History of American Linguistic Thought

History of American Linguistic Thought

Rice University

© 2005

Foreword

History of American Linguistic Thought came into existence because Ioccasionally taught a course entitled Modern Linguistic Theory. As best as Ican recall, I first taught it in 1969-1970. At that time, the course had nohistorical perspective, and the material was presented as “what’s happeningnow”, more or less. But as time passed, “what’s happening now” wasn’thappening anymore, and it became “history”. The emphasis of the coursechanged. In place of looking at “theories” as objectively as possible in order todiscriminate between the good ones and the less good ones, the goal was tounderstand why linguists did (were doing) what they did. In retrospect, someof the directions seem obviously misguided. And some still practiced, still are,I think. Such determinations are often a matter of personal experience andpersonal taste, and I will try to address some of these issues in the last chapter.

The title History of American Linguistic Thought (chosen in part so that Ican abbreviate it HALT) requires some immediate qualification. First, thediscussion here is limited to the 20th century, and to not all of the 20thcentury, at that. The story starts in earnest in the mid-1920’s, but it looksbackward to some occurrences in the 19th century to help understand thestances taken at this arbitrary beginning point. The story ceases about 1975with a discussion of Government & Binding. Second, it is a Sketch (at best).This is not intended to chronicle all varieties and all contributions to thedebate about language. It is not a true history. My intent is to identify what Ibelieve have been the principle currents in the discussion of language, and indoing this I necessarily omit mention of the work of many (or most) linguistsin the 20th century. The omission is not to be taken as censure nor as animplicit judgment of their irrelevance. Nor is it to be taken that all worthwhilework in linguistics originates in the USA. I just had to choose. In anotherplace (Davis 1973), I have outlined some of the approaches to languageomitted here, and over the years, other authors have detailed and placed thework of a variety of linguists in their appropriate contexts.

The purpose of HALT is to help understand why linguistics, theprofessional inquiry into language, has done what it has and not somethingelse. Ultimately, I want to understand why linguistic thought — in the viewput forward here — progressed so little in the 20th century. One of thearguments of the text will be that although there were protestations ofinnovation (and even “revolution”), nothing much changed in the period be-

-iv-

tween 1926 to 1975, and we have inherited many of those ways of thinking.Since the 50+ years covered in HALT are the founding period of “modern”linguistics, I believe that it is important to be familiar with the orientationstoward language that were established then. It is important to reflect on howwe do things now, to understand how much of it is just historical accident, andto identify what is worth keeping and what, not.

If all these qualifications and amplifications were encoded in the title, itwould be something like Sketch of the History of American Linguistic Thoughtfrom Some Time before 1926 until about 1975 with an Eye towardsEvaluation. Clearly, not as catchy as HALT.

August 25, 2005Houston, TX

Chapter 1

An Introduction to Thinking About Language.Devil’s Advocate: Why a theory?

1. IntroductionThere is something in humankind that abhors chaos, the absence of

pattern; and ‘theory’ and ‘science’ are one kind of response to that malease.So is language a response of that sort to chaotic experience. The sensitivity tochaos, the cognitive attraction to that which does not fit what we know and tothat which is different, is present in all living organisms as the biologicallyuniversal orienting reflex. The equally universal capacity of intelligence tohabituate provides a way of imposing pattern and of removing chaos fromexperience. The attraction which chaos has for all organisms is a concomitantof intelligence, which exists to create pattern, the antithesis to chaos.Intelligence ‘factored’ into ‘capacities’:

(i) Sensitivity to environment(ii) Memory ... requires(iii) Identity, metaphor, insight, creativity ... requires segmentation by(iv) Focal attention, awareness ... but leaves the unsegmented for(v) Automatic processing.

The application of these capacities ... which are not exclusively human ...creates identities which are recurringly attributed to novel (chaotic because itis novel) experience and which assimilate the experience to extant pattern.The precipitate of the engagement of intelligence with experience yields a‘memory’ of that activity. That residue is knowledge. Language isknowledge. And science is knowledge. Being able to find my car thisafternoon and drive home is knowledge. But is language science; or is sciencelanguage?

Not all knowledge is the same. Not all knowledge is susceptible to our in(tro)spection. We do not (cannot)

always know/be aware of what we know. Some of what we call language is inthis way overt; but most of language is not overt. It is covert. We can obtain

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some information about language simply by asking certain questions of aperson who speaks that language. Other information is not so easilyaccessible. “What do you call a four-legged animal than goes ‘oink’?” versus“What sounds are in your language?”; or “What is the difference between ‘Itwas yesterday that I forgot my keys’ and ‘Yesterday I forgot my keys’?”; or“What is the difference between ‘That was a heavy book you hit him with’and ‘That’s a heavy book you hit him with’?”; or “‘That’s a friend of mymother’ versus ‘That’s a friend of my mother’s’?”. Such differences willcause some difficulty ... in different ways ... for our understanding oflanguage, and for our theories of language.

The knowledge that constitutes science is overt and it is privileged. Whenapplied to language, science must make what is covert, overt.1 This overtness... expressed as testability, and methodologically in the scientific method ofcontrolled observation ... is the source of the privilege of scientific knowledge.We assign a higher (or different) value ... greater reliability ... to what weknow as science than we do to what we know as speakers of our ownlanguages and to what we know that allows us to find our way home in theafternoon. Science deals with truth . It seems to make no sense to say that alanguage can be true or false (or ‘better’ [‘civilized’] or ‘worse’ [‘primitive’])... language may be ‘mistaken’, perhaps as when my son complained “Youbeen having that fork in your mouth!” But such manifestations of language arenot ‘false’. Similarly, when I get lost going home, that is inconvenient; I’vemade a mistake, but again what I did is not false/untrue. But scientificknowledge which has been shown to be mistaken is false/untrue.

Somehow, language has extruded some portion of itself as science, whichis capable of being constantly overt and its content, constantly falsifiable. Thescience of language then turns back upon its origin in an attempt to draw theremainder from the shadows and to make it, too, overt ... to create a science oflanguage. The scientific knowledge produced by this activity are the ‘theories’of this discussion.

Science supports its special stature with its methodology. The public andreplicable techniques by which information is attained allows science totranscend the immediacy of its experience and to become general oruniversal. And to the extent that the information is not contradicted, it isaccepted as true. It is the methodology of science that maintains theknowledge that is science as different from other knowledge, and as different

1 Some of the terms used in linguistics to label this desired quality have been ‘rigorous’,‘explicit’, and ‘formal’. And the negative/absence of this has sometimes been called‘mentalism’, ‘fuzzy linguistics’, or simply ‘not linguistics’.

Introduction to Thinking about Language 3

from language. So that any knowledge that will be scientific must meet those(some) methodological standards. To be a scientist you must act like one.But if the method fails, so the knowledge fails. Whatever it may be, itbecomes not science ... If linguistics (‘the science of language’) is to be ascience, it requires a methodology, and it must work with what all can see.But if much of language is covert, the information that the science of languageaccumulates may not be testable/repeatable under the same conditions. But isthere an overt?2 To find an answer, for example, to the question about thenumber of sounds in a language, we must know when two utterances arerepetitions. Consider the question of whether a speaker can ever repeatexactly the same [the reduction of chaos to pattern again] word? How will wedecide what counts as a repetition?

[ ]and this pair:

[ ] vs. [ ]

(i) I sprained my [].

What we can grasp in a scientifically acceptable manner may not be thewhole of language. And if the scientific method guarantees that the patterns oflanguage will not be touched upon, which shall we discard [must we?]:

the data which are tainted or the status of science?

2. The Search for PatternScientific inquiry is concerned with the search for pattern. To understand

is to see pattern, to reduce new observations/experiences to old. To see themas distinct instances of knowledge. Kuhn (1970.62-63) cites this case ofanomaly and the reaction to it:

... Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short andcontrolled exposure a series of playing cards. Many were normal, but some were

2 Linguists lack the mechanical equivalents of the cyclotron or the Hubble telescope. Thereis no tool external to language itself which may stand as semi-neutral witness to theotherwise ‘covert’. Positron emission tomography (PET) “can give quantitative informationabout the function of the nervous system” (Sid Gilman & Sarah Winans Newman. 1987.Manter and Gatz’s Essentials of Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology7.Philadelphia: F.A. Davis & Company. P. 242), and some now may suggest that PETtechnology can fill the observational gap for language. Earlier, the technique/exercise ofphonetics promised to be the observational tool for language.

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made anomalous, e.g. a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Eachexperimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subjectin a series of gradually increased exposures. After each exposure the subject wasasked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successful correctidentifications.

Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identified most of the cards,and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cardsthese identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almostalways identified, without apparent hesitation, or puzzlement, as normal. Theblack four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spadesor hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one ofthe conceptual categories prepared by prior experience. One would not evenlike to say that the subjects had seen something different from what theyidentified. With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjectsdid begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example,to the red six of spades, some would say: That’s the six of spades, but there’ssomething wrong with it — the black has a red border. Further increase ofexposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, andsometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correctidentification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or threeanomalous cards, they would have little difficulty with the others. A few subjects,however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories.Even at forty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards forwhat they were, more than 10 per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctlyidentified. And the subjects who failed often experienced acute personal distress[Emphases mine, PWD]. One of them exclaimed: ‘I can’t make that suit out,whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color itis now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure what a spade lookslike. My God!

The search for pattern in this example is personally or naturally motivated;it is what we do to make sense of our experience. But there may be other areasof experience in which different motivations for imposing pattern are present.For practical reasons, the movement of celestial objects may be codified sothat their repetitive patterns can be used in travel by determining location. Theestablishment of astronomy results. Or in the interest of reestablishingproperty boundaries after they are destroyed in floods, the principles ofgeometry and trigonometry are established. Or in order to maintain the correctperformance of sacred texts, a metatext ... a grammar, e.g. ’s and others’grammars of Sanskrit, and the principles of a linguistics may emerge. But thesearch for pattern may also be pursued for no (immediately) practical reason,e.g. the Greeks’ elaboration of geometry and ‘pure research’.3. Identity, pattern, and prediction


Pattern centers upon identity and recurrence. The identity may that ofthe same thing on different occasions, e.g. identifying the North Star,recreating a property line, or in repeating a word. In these cases, the contextfor asserting identity is a matrix of time. The time is different while thesubstance is the same. The difference between the two experiences isremoved from the perception and located elsewhere; and in order to do thatwe have to create time (a ‘now’ and a ‘then’).

The problem of identity will arise in a different way, e.g. in seeing theMorning Star and the Evening Star as the same entity, Venus. Or in seeingKorean [s] and [] as the same. In addition to different times, there is nowdifference in substance between the things equated. After all, a bright light inthe morning is not a bright light in the evening, and a [s] is not a []. Thesameness now lies in the constancy of the context in which these appear. Thesameness is not directly ‘in’ the two experiences, but in their circumstance.For example, [] is joined to a position before front vowels and [s] is not. Inplace of internal sameness, the sameness is in the conditioningenvironments.3 What matters is not the presence of difference but of therecognition of systematic patterned difference. This ‘systematicity’ is whatallows us to perceive distinct experience as ‘same’.

The outcome is that pattern exists as a creation, an abstraction. Anactual difference is systematically ignored/removed leaving no difference. Theidentity is the link between two experiences which lies in neither, but in ourrelation to them. In that the link is in neither experience itself, it lies outsidethem and in its own context. In the context of language, this yields naming,e.g. {book}, that must be in discourse ... that must be in our experience as thisbook, a book, some book, any book, etc. What we call ‘language’ — before weget to it as linguists — operates in terms of ‘abstractions’ of this sort.

Dealing/reacting to experience in this way — whether covertly andunaware or overtly and self-consciously — effectively allows us to transcendthe moment. We are no longer held to the immediacy of perception; we cannow reference other times and spaces, and other experiences. We gain ingenerality. Generality, here, means fewer ‘units’.

A second consequence derives from the systematic and non-randomproperty of pattern (however we see it):

(1) 2 6 3 (9 4.5 13.5)(2) 2 4 6 (8 10 12)

3 The distinction between the two contrasting examples is, of course, not discrete and is amatter of degree. All perceptions of sameness are similar to those of the second sort.

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(3) 13 39 5

Looking at the first three numbers in (1), we may be able to guess the nextthree (and any others as long as we know what position in the series theyoccupy). That is, X/2 yields the number following X if X > the numberpreceding X; otherwise, 3X yields the next number. In (2), it is simpler. Wedo not need to know where in the series a number falls; given any X the nextis X + 2. But (3) is different. We would be hard put, given just those threenumbers, to guess the fourth, or the fifth. The sameness/pattern of (1) is that‘abstraction’:

X/2 yields the number after X if X > the number preceding X;otherwise, 3X yields the next number

There is a superficial difference between examples such as (1) and earlier onessuch as the North Star. Given a visual glimpse of the night sky, we may reactrapidly to the question “Is what you see the North Star?” whereas if given thenumber 30.375, it will take us some time to answer whether it is part of thewhole series of (1) or whether it belongs to a different series.4 Not all serieswill require a great amount of time; for example, in (2) we know immediatelythat any even number will belong to it. The nature of such abstractions as (1)and (2) — the sameness which holds them together and allows them to exist,whether ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ — seems to allow us to predict or calculate possibleexperience. And we seem to have grasped them as patterned only when wecan satisfy ourselves that such prediction is possible. If you cannotpredict/calculate whether 30.375 belongs in (1), you have not ‘understood’ it.The same condition appears in (4):

(4) The dog yelped.The cat meowed.His teacher groaned.

Knowing what constitutes the first word, the second, and the third predictssuch utterances as

(5) His cat yelped.The cat groaned.

4 The answer is ‘yes’; it does belong to the series of (1).


The sequence Prediction ––> Pattern ––> Understanding is commonlyaccepted in scientific practice and in linguistics. If one can ‘predict’, thenthere is a ‘pattern’; and if there is a ‘pattern’, we ‘understand’ thephenomenon.5 But notice that there appears to be little prediction in theexample of the North Star.

4. TheoryTo begin to express any experience in a self-conscious way, we require an

inventory with which to represent those perceptions, e.g. numbers off dials,photographs of the events within a cyclotron, or a phonetic transcription. Weneed to fix our experience so that we can make it overt and manipulable.6 Forconvenience, we may call this the observational language. In the schema ofabstractions, there are two types: assumed primitives and created definitions.For our example in (4), Det, Noun, and Verb may be taken as primitives; andin (1), number will appear as a primitive. They are given. Definitions mayconsist of expressions such as ‘Det + Noun + Verb’ or ‘3X’.7 A third type ofelement may be necessary to constrain definitions. For example, Det andVerb may be adjacent, i.e., although there is no *Noun + Verb + Det, theremay be Verb + Det + Noun (e.g. Catch the dog) in English. Further, elementsnot be simultaneous: they have only linear relationships. Examples of suchlimitations/ constraints are:

(6) The Complex NP Constraint (Radford 1981.218):

“No rule can move any element out of a Complex Noun Phrase Clause (i.e. no

rule can move any constituent X out of the bracketed clause in any structure of

the type ... [NP ... [N – [–S ... X ...] ...]”

(a) You gave up Linguistics –––>Linguistics you gave up –––.

but(b) It would be a pity for [NP [you[S to give up LinguisticsX]] –––>

5 Cf. the ubiquity of ‘rule’.

6 This first ‘fixing’ of course can have a determining effect upon what we say about the data,for it, in fact, determines what the data are. In that way, there can be no such thing as ‘raw’data; nothing is baked from scratch. It is all somehow been prepared for us.

7 Of course, other primitives are required as well to create these definitions.

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For you to give up linguistics would be a pity.*LinguisticsX for [NP[you [Sto give up ––– ]] would be a pity.*LinguisticsX would be a pity for [NP[you [Sto give up ––– ]]

.(7) Phonetic similarity among allophones:

(a) E.g. English [h] and [](b) E.g. Japanese [h] and [f]

(8) ‘Parallel lines never intersect’ where ‘parallel’ is a definedrelationship between two lines perpendicular to some thirdline.

This third type of conceptual tool is the axioms. Formally then, a theory is aset of primitives and any axioms and the definitions that are based upon thepreceding.

5. Dimensions of theoriesA theory is usually a theory of something, i.e., it is derived from (or

applied to) some data (experience), although it need not be in order to remaina theory. Thus, empirical theories are distinguished from non-empiricalones. An empirical theory is recognized as one that has a relation to data viathe observational language, e.g.

(9) (a) Det + Noun + Verb Theory(b) Observational language(c) a performance of (b) Data

As long as a theory is an empirical one, there is the probability that therewill be more than one of them for the same range, or overlapping ranges, ofdata. One explanation for the existence of mosquitoes is that they are theremains of the sun’s son, known as Kank. He was permitted just once toguide across the sky the boat containing the fire which warms the earth; but inplace of adding wood to the fire gradually as the boat progressed across thesky, he put it all on at once causing everything exposed to be burnt up. Hisfather was angry at him and spanked him ... spanked him so hard that heturned into a cloud of dust and his bones scattered to become today’smosquitoes. That, of course, is not our explanation for the mosquito. Whathappens when there is more than one understanding of a phenomenon? If we


decide that the phenomenon is the same, then the theories are in some sense incompetition. And if these are scientific theories, then the issue is what istruth ?8 They must in some way be evaluated so that we can determine, atleast, which is better (if not which is true). The evaluation may appeal tovarious measures:

(10) Confirmability : circularity and the possibility of discon-firmation. Possibility of checking ... overtness. The func-tions of experimentation.

(11) Degree of fit: Preciseness. E.g. Keplerian celestial mecha-nics versus Ptolemaic.

(12) Generality: Extension in that the theory makes sense ofa range of data in addition to those observed, of a differentsort. The incorporating, integrating ideal.

Confirmability may contribute to distinguishing between scientific and non-scientific theories. The ‘myth’ is in principle not confirmable.

Linguistic theory, i.e., theories of language, make possible sets ofstatements we call grammars, each appropriate to a specific language:

THEORYGrammar1 Grammar2

The dog yelped[run the dog the] ‘The dog ran’

‘The man spoke’

‘The cat walked’

Now in view of Grammar2, the specific linearity of Det + Noun + Verb nolonger holds, but linearity is still present. Each competing theory of languagemay be judged on the merits of (i) the grammar(s) it makes possible for eachlanguage and (ii) on the grammar(s) it allows for languages not yet observed.The first is a matter of (11) ... the degree of fit or accuracy. The second is a

8 In the example of the mosquito, there is no competitive evaluation. The first explanation islabeled as not scientific (It’s a ‘myth’.), and it does not enter into a comparison with thebiological explanation.

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matter of (12), which for theories of language entails a characterization ofpossible language. The Phonetic Similarity Constraint of (7) narrows theconception of language for any theory which contains it. Again, a matter of(11). It is now a matter of examining languages to determine whether thetheory is supported or contradicted.

It may be possible for two competing theories to be indistinguishable interms of (10) - (12). If such were the case, then they are identical withrespect to the data which they are attempting to order. Yet they may stilldiffer; and if so, then the difference is internal , i.e., with respect to theprimitives, axioms, and definitions themselves. The criterion which isapplicable at this point is:

(13) Simplicity : The theory which can do the same with less ispreferred.

This level of delicacy has not been reached for theories of language andSimplicity is not yet an independent criterion; but Simplicity plays a role inconjunction with Degree of Fit and with Generality. For example, pursuit ofthe fewest number of phonemes (an example of Simplicity in a grammar) is adesideratum limited by Degree of Fit.9 Simplicity will co-vary with Generalityso that the more general will be the simpler. Theories may be constructed sothat the more general grammar is also the simpler (manifested as the‘shorter’).

The idea of evaluation is directed towards overtly and objectivelyresolving the question ‘Is it right or is it wrong? Is it true?’ If the link betweenGenerality and Simplicity can be maintained, then the answer is madeobjective. We simply calculate which theory (or grammar) is the simpler, andthat one theory (or grammar) must also, therefore, be the more general, thebetter, and the more true. But can a theory still be wrong if it works? We maydecline to submit to evaluation, but admire the product of our theorizing onother grounds. One way to avoid this evaluation is to claim that the theory issimply a mechanical tool to aid in the manipulation of the data. This attitudehas been aptly called instrumentalism. Galileo in his de RevolutionibusOrbium Coelestium espoused this approach:

... it is not necessary that these hypotheses should be true, or even probably; but it is

enough if they provide a calculus which fits the observations ...

9 The retreat from the abstract phonologies illustrated by Chomsky & Halle 1968 (whichwere sanctioned by appeals to Simplicity) to more concrete ones (Kiparsky 1968) wasmotivated by an appeal to Degree of Fit. The latter began to outweigh the former again.


The attitude of instrumentalism when it occurs within linguistics has beencalled “hocus pocus” (Householder 1952). Such opinions may concern only aportion of a theory (or be held only temporarily). Sir Isaac Newton, forexample, maintained such a reservation concerning the introduction of gravity(action at a distance) into mechanics; and a belief in corpuscular mechanismsand ether continued into the 19th century. While odd within a Euclideangeometry, within a non-Euclidean one (such as the curved space of Riemann),gravity becomes a consistent aspect of that space. It is no longer a ‘tool’ tomake the system work; it is part of the system itself. A similar reservation hasbeen made concerning the morphophoneme in a theory of language (Hockett1961.42):

It has no status in language, but is evoked by our desire to make cross-stratum

correlations neat.

These partial or temporary opinions of instrumentalism have beendistinguished as descriptivism. The other extreme opinion — which weassumed above — is generally termed realism and within linguistics (againHouseholder 1952), it is recognized as “God’s truth”.

We have now several ways of carrying out the scientific endeavor ofcreating a theory. Returning to the initial task of constructing a set ofstatements for some interesting range of data, we now find that we make adopttwo contrasting attitudes, and this will introduce the possibility of furtherdiversity among theories. Our concern with finding the ‘true’understanding/description of our data make prompt us to try to guarantee thecorrect outcome before-hand. The idea is that the correct, most highlyevaluated description will emerge automatically.

One way to attempt this is to take the handling techniques or experimentalmanipulations of the data (what one does in the laboratory) and match them(convert them) into the definitions of the theory. This constrains what a theorycan be, for no notion may appear in the theory if there is no operation whichcan be performed to produce it. Such care in the construction of theory hasbeen most notably characteristic of psychology and of linguistics as practicedin the United States. The constraint is called operationalism, and inlinguistics it was directed toward the establishment of discovery procedures.The conservative nature of operationalism also dictated that the process beginwith the most certain data, i.e. phonetics and not meaning. This is what givesAmerican structuralism of the 1930’s to the 1950’s its bottom ––> up

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directionality. Alternately, in place of trying to define pattern by a set of procedures, we

may assume it, using our best guesses and then weed out the competitorsusing the evaluation criteria introduced above. Theories which result from thispractice are explanatory. They take on a top ––> down directionality. Thestatements which they generate are called explanations while the operationaltheories produce descriptions. In an explanatory theory, the data followdeductively and categorically from the assumed best-guess theory. Otherpossible explanations, in addition to the deductive-categorical, are statistical,teleological, and historical.

The opposition between operational and explanatory theories magnifiesthe variety of scientific practice. A final addition which needs to be mentionedhere is the opposition between taxonomic and nontaxonomic. While theseare characteristics of the component patterns of theories, they may also betaken as prior attitudes to constrain the theories themselves. A taxonomictheory is one which is limited to such patterns as those typically found inbiological classification. A nontaxonomic one is not so limited; it may containa taxonomy, it but may also exhibit patterns which are not stated in terms ofclasses (or categories) and members.

6. ConclusionAll of the identified positions have been espoused at some time or other in

some theory of language. But this variety is not limited to linguists; it is notsolely our doing. Given these attitudes, it can at least be understood (in part)why there are so many theories for us to deal with ... so many kinds oflinguistic thought.

Chapter 2

Remarkson

Hockett’s“The Changing Intellectual Context of Linguistic Theory”

&Kuhn’s

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

1. IntroductionHockett and Kuhn are both interested in the history of science.

Comparison of the two approaches provides some insight into our owninterest in linguistics and language.

2. HockettHockett (1983) finds several themes which allow one to follow the flow of

intellectual activity in the nineteenth century. Two of these themes, which heintroduces with Pierre-Simon Laplace, are the notions of progress anddeterminism. The latter forms the primary criterion for the distinctionbetween two allocations of phenomena. “There are two categories of sciencebecause there are two fundamentally different kinds of things to be scientificabout” (Hockett 1983:14). The two categories of science are termed

Naturwissenschaft Geisteswissenschaft

Precise characterization of the opposition between the two changed during thenineteenth century as more data became available (more discoveries weremade, aided in part by improving technology), and as conceptions of the datawere altered. Hockett (1983:20-21) identifies several oppositions as formingthe basis of the two kinds of science:

Physical MentalDeterminate IndeterminateSynchronic Diachronic

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Nomothetic Idiographic

It is only in Naturwissenschaft (or la philosophie naturelle or natural science)that one can exercise the scientific ideal, and the history of science in thenineteenth century is one in which the range of Geisteswissenschaft is reducedand that of Naturwissenschaft is augmented. Geisteswissenschaft (or lessciences morales) does not permit one to use the methods of Naturwissen-schaft because the data do not exhibit pattern. They are not determinate, andtherefore they are not predictable (Hockett 1983:14 & 16):

In the realm of nature one can make timeless assertions: the valence of oxygen is

two, always has been, and always will be, whether the oxygen is on someone’s

bloodstream or in an interstellar cloud. But in Geisteswissenschaft there can be no

such generalizations. The way things are in the human world is constantly changed

by the willful actions of people. Therefore only a particularistic approach is possible

— whereupon the Geisteswissenchaften were also called the historical sciences, or

just history ... Perhaps it was not so foolish, after all, to propose that plants, animals,

and languages, all as then conceived, are sufficiently alike to merit assignment to a

single larger category.

But the boundary of this division shifts throughout the nineteenth centuryand the character of the boundary is changed as well. In the initial state ofaffairs, Geisteswissenschaft appears to have included all the life sciences, andthe contrast was nearly one of organic (Geisteswissenschaft) versus inorganic(Naturwissenschaft). Geisteswissenschaft was guided the doctrine of byvitalism (Hockett 1983:13):

The vitalist view had held that “organic” compounds, meaning those found

characteristically and exclusively in organisms, could not be built up out of raw-materials except under the direction of the posited vital energy.

The first realignment followed from the discovery that organic results canoriginate from inorganic sources. The synthesis of urea demonstrated thatsuch a vitalist view was incorrect, and then “it was demonstrated that the lawsof thermodynamics hold in organisms just as they do in nonliving organisms”(Hockett 1983:13). The effect was not to change the way of working withinthe Geisteswissenchaften; it simply resulted in the establishment ofphysiology as a Naturwissenschaft and the removal of some phenomena fromone category to the other, leaving minds and the phenomena associated with

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them (humans) subject to vitalism (Hockett 1983:14):

... the gulf between living and nonliving seemed narrower, [but] that [gulf] between

human and nonhuman yawned as unbridgeable as ever. It did not matter that human

physiology is much like other physiology. Obviously human beings have bodies,

which behave like matter because that is what they are ... But we also have minds,

and mind is a different sort of substance, obedient perhaps to different laws.

The place of language in the division depended upon whether one saw thephenomenon as subject to individual will or whether the relevant phenomenonwas beyond the reach of that will. If we look at the data then emerging fromcomparative study, it may appear that there are a succession of stages which— because they seem to show a progression — are determinate in theirbehavior. In particularistic observations on the behavior of individuals, theconclusion must be that there is no determined shape to the data and it isindeterminate; but in the aggregate and over time, there is determinatebehavior. Hockett (1983:16-17) cites William Dwight Whitney asexemplifying the first view, and August Schleicher as maintaining the second... with his proposed diachronic progression of languages from isolating toagglutinative to inflecting. Ultimately, they represent two complementary andnoncompeting views of the same phenomenon; one does not have to choosebetween them. However, it is the viewpoint represented by Schleicher whichfirst carries linguistics from the domain of Geisteswissenschaft toNaturwissenschaft with the establishment of laws, which “showed a pervasiveregularity”, and which “seemed not to have any connection with the humanwill”, and which were “in a sense, a mass phenomenon, affecting many peopleat once” (Hockett 1983:22).

The viewpoint which Whitney represented remained subject to Geistes-wissenschaft until two additional notions were made prominent and finallyunited into one perspective: granularity (Hockett 1983:24-26) and pattern-ing/arrangement (Hockett 1983:26-29). In the Naturwissenschaften, granu-larity appeared in the form of molecules in chemistry, as cells in physiology,and finally as the quanta of light in physics. The granular mode of thinkingwas in the air and in linguistics as well; the grammatical tradition spanningtwo millennia in which sentences were seen as composed of their parts, andthe longer experience with alphabetic writing systems made the extension ofparticles to phonetics a natural one. Patterning in Naturwissenschaften isidentified with “the arrangement of parts” (Hockett 1983:26), and not with thesubstance which implements that pattern. Such substance may in this view be

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replaced completely without damage to the pattern; “in the course of timeevery constituent atom of a person’s body is replaced, but the pattern persistsand continuity of identity is unbroken” (Hockett 1983:26-27). Withinlinguistics, we can now see such pattern in syntax — if viewed as anarrangement of words into hierarchical forms — and in the concept of thephoneme. Patterns such as these may stand beyond the behavior and will ofindividuals forming a constant identity, which the will and vagaries of theindividual may not touch. Pattern in this view is exclusively equated with‘arrangement’ and ‘structure’, and ‘Gestalt’. Structuralism replacesvitalism. The possibility of there being another mode in which pattern may bepresent is no longer possible (Hockett 1983:29 and 32):

In syntax, Gestalt plays such a crucial role that if one takes it away there is nothing

left –– and this has been so from the very beginnings of the discipline in classical

antiquity ... the structure [pattern, PWD] of a thing, event, or system, if I understand

it aright, is nothing other than the pattern [structure, PWD] it manifests.

In this way, the second viewpoint maintained by Whitney is also transferredfrom the realm of Geisteswissenschaft into Naturwissenschaft. Language cannow be interpreted as physical, determinate, synchronic, and nomothetic.

3. KuhnKuhn (1970) proposes a different and more general scenario intended to

allow us to understand the ways in which scientific study is pursued. Hedistinguishes several states of such activity:

(i) “Prehistory as a science” or “pre-paradigm period” (Kuhn1970:21 & 163)

(ii) Paradigmatic science(iii) Normal science(iv) Crisis science(v) Crisis resolution or the return to normal science

As an example of the prescientific condition Kuhn (1970:13) cites theexample of “physical optics”:

... anyone examining a survey of physical optics before Newton may well conclude

that, although the field’s practitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity

was something less than science. Being able to take no common body of belief for

Hocket & Kuhn 5

granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from itsfoundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation and experiment was

relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or of phenomena that every

optical writer felt forced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the

dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other

schools as it was to nature. That pattern is not unfamiliar in a number of creative [i.e.

not scientific, PWD] fields today, nor is it incompatible with significant discovery

and invention.

Recognizing these practitioners in the pre-paradigmatic condition to bescientists, Kuhn also allows their work the status of ‘theory’. A movementaway from this condition occurs when (Kuhn 1970:10 & 17):

[there is an achievement] ... sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduringgroup of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity.

Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended [emph. mine, PWD] to leave all

sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve ... To be

accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors ...

One of the conditions for normal science, then, is a successful evaluation ofone of the competing modes of thought, which becomes thereby theparadigm for that science. “In its established usage, a paradigm is anaccepted model or pattern, and that aspect of its meaning has enabled me,lacking a better word, to appropriate ‘paradigm’ here” (Kuhn 1970:23). Theothers will lose adherents and fall into disuse. Kuhn (1970:17) sees thisweeding out process as irreversible in that such a field will not revert to thecondition in which many theories are again competing with no one of them inthe ascendancy (Kuhn 1970:17 & 19):

[initial divergences] ... do disappear to a very considerable extent and then

apparently once and for all ... There are always some men who cling to one or

another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which

thereafter ignores their work.

Sociologically, the practitioners are transformed from “a group ... interestedmerely in the study of nature into a profession or, at least, a discipline” (Kuhn1970:19), recognized by the presence of journals, societies, and a place inthe curriculum . Because there are fewer (or no) competing views, thepractitioner can now “take a paradigm for granted, [and] he need no longer, in

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his major works, attempt to build his field anew, starting from first principlesand justifying the use of each concept introduced” (Kuhn 1970:19-20).Textbooks come into existence.

At the paradigmatic stage, the subject matter becomes more textured; theperspective provided by the paradigm brings certain questions to the fore andplaces others in the background (Kuhn 1970:15):

In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that

could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem

equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly randomactivity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar.

The emergence of a paradigm does not require that the victorious view becomprehensive (Kuhn 1970:23 & 24):

Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors

in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as

acute ... Normal science [emph. mine, PWD] consists in the actualization of that

promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that

the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the matchbetween those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the

paradigm itself ... Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists

throughout their careers.

The experimental activity of normal science (opposed to theoretical activity)centers on three areas:

(i) “that class of facts that the paradigm has shown to beparticularly revealing of the nature of things” (Kuhn1970:25)

(ii) “those facts that, though often without much intrinsicinterest, can be compared directly with predictions from theparadigm theory” (Kuhn 1970:26)

(iii) “work undertaken to articulate the paradigm theory,resolving some of its residual ambiguities and permitting thesolution of problems to which it had previously only drawnattention. This class proves to be the most important of all ...More than any other sort of normal research, the problems ofparadigm articulation are simultaneously theoretical and

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experimental ...” (Kuhn 1970:27)

Normal science consists in the incorporation of additional information andthe ordered elaboration of the paradigm. Puzzles are solved; anomalies arediscovered and made integral (Kuhn 1970:79):

... the puzzles that constitute normal science exist only because no paradigm that

provides a basis for scientific research ever completely resolves all its problems ...

every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from anotherviewpoint, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis.

Some residual problems may resist incorporation and produce “a period ofpronounced professional insecurity. As one might expect, that insecurity isgenerated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to comeout as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for newones” (Kuhn 1970:67-68). And this creates a crisis. The response has neveryet been the abandonment of the paradigm and a return to the pre-paradigmatic condition (Kuhn 1970:77 & 79):1

... once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid

only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place. No process yet disclosed

by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological

stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature ... The decision to reject

one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the

judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with

nature and with each other ... To reject one paradigm without simultaneously

substituting another is to reject science itself. That act reflects not on the paradigm

but on the man. Inevitably he will be seen by his colleagues as ‘the carpenter whoblames his tools’.

When a crisis condition comes to exist, it may be resolved in three ways(Kuhn 1970:84): it may eventually be reduced within the old paradigm, itmay be set aside for future generations, or it may prompt the emergence of anew candidate paradigm (Kuhn 1970:80):

1 “Though history is unlikely to record their names, some men have undoubtedly been drivento desert science because of their inability to tolerate crisis. Like artists, creative scientistsmust occasionally be able to live in a world out of joint — elsewhere I have described thatnecessity as ‘the essential tension’” (Kuhn 1970:78-79).

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... by proliferating versions of the paradigm, crisis loosens the rules of normal

puzzle-solving in ways that ultimately permit a new paradigm to emerge.

By a process similar to the emergence of the original paradigm, it may bereplaced as the dominant one. ‘Has your illness progressed?’ Does scienceprogress?

To a very great extent the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in

obvious ways ... we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked ...But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution towardsanything. (Kuhn 1970:160,162 & 170)

Pre-paradigmatic science cannot progress since there is no replacement, onlysimultaneous competition. When one paradigm becomes dominant, inevitablyto be replaced by another, then there may be a sense of ‘progress’.2 Since onenever returns to a displaced paradigm, the impression is that progression-as-replacement is also progression-as-improvement. Why, after all, would thealteration occur if not as a (perceived) improvement? But since the newparadigm will itself inevitably be replaced (they have always have been), the‘progress’ is only a local one. The impression of progress is, in this way, aredundant epiphenomenon.3

There is, however, a gradation in the “confidence in their paradigms”which appears to differentiate (i) the arts from (ii) “history, philosophy, and

2 Kuhn (1970:161) sees the return (retrogression) of “art” to “primitive models” as the sourceof the cleavage between “art” and “science”:

For many centuries, both in antiquity and again in early modern Europe, painting wasregarded as the cumulative discipline. During those years the artist’s goal was assumedto be representation. Critics and historians, like Pliny and Vasari, then recorded withveneration the series of inventions from foreshortening through chiaroscuro that hadmade possible successively more perfect representations of nature ... even after thatsteady exchange [between arts and science as illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci] hadceased, the term ‘art’ continued to apply as much to technology and the crafts, whichwere also seen as progressive, as to painting and sculpture. Only when the latterunequivocally renounced representation as their goal and began to learn again fromprimitive models did the cleavage we now take for granted assume anything like itspresent depth.

3 This returns us to Laplace and his two characteristics of science: progression anddeterminism. And now it is the former which appears the more important as a criterion ofscience, but that ‘progress’ is now different. Hockett (1983:10) portrays it as a conscious“collective march” having begun at least with the Enlightenment in the 18th century. This isnot the same as the revolutionary, eclipsing progress which Kuhn proposes.

Hocket & Kuhn 9

the social sciences” and from (iii) the “natural sciences”. Education in thesethree fields from (i) to (iii) relies increasingly upon the use of textbooks untilthe last stages of instruction because the essential content is confidentlyencapsulated in texts. In arts, “the practitioner gains his education by exposureto the works of other artists”. In the mid-range areas of social science,textbooks are employed, but “even in these fields the elementary collegecourse employs parallel readings in the original sources, some of them‘classics’ of the field, others the contemporary research reports thatpractitioners write for each other” (Kuhn 1970:165). In the natural sciences,“the few [curricula] that do assign supplementary reading in research papersand monographs restrict such assignments to the most advanced course and tomaterials that take up more or less where the available texts leave off” (Kuhn1970:165). The strength of this “confidence” in or “commitment” (Kuhn1970:100) to one’s paradigm is evident when it has to be abandoned (Kuhn1970:151-52):

The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that

cannot be forced. Lifelong resistance, particularly from those whose productive

careers have committed them to an older tradition of normal science, is not a

violation of scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself.The source of resistance is the assurance that the older paradigm will ultimately

solve all its problems, that nature can be shoved into the box that the paradigm

provides. Inevitably, at times of revolution, that assurance seems stubborn and

pigheaded as indeed it sometimes becomes. But it is also something more. That same

assurance is what makes normal or puzzle-solving science possible. And it is only

through normal science that the professional community of scientists succeeds, first,

in exploiting the potential scope and precision of the older paradigm and, then in

isolating the difficulty through the study of which a new paradigm may emerge.

4. ConclusionUsing Kuhn’s paradigm for the history of science, linguistics has not just

recently become a science in the twentieth century.4 It has had a long historywith its own paradigms (sometimes shared with other fields). This blending,in which several distinct scientific interests can have a common notion, e.g.the breadth/use of vitalism or structuralism, recurs within linguistics and

4 But consider the age of our own journals, societies, and curricula/departments. Hockett(1948:566) asserts that “Linguistics is only in its beginnings”, whereas Whorf (1940:232)describes linguistics as “a very old science” although in “its modern experimental phase ...[it} could be called one of the newest”.

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permits a wide range of activities ... all the while sharing a single paradigm.Cf. Figure 1 from Southworth & Daswani (1974:8).

Returning to Hockett’s themes in this light, the transition from nineteenthcentury to twentieth century science in the fields identified asGeisteswissenschaft is the transition from the paradigm of vitalism to that ofstructuralism (Hockett 1983:33):

...in the middle of the present century there was –– and perhaps still is –– a whole

complicated ‘structuralist’ movement, in fields as diverse as ethnology, literary

criticism, and mathematics some of whose participants proclaim theirmethodological indebtedness to Prague.

Figure 1: Linguistics in the 20th century.

This paradigm, for the moment at least, behaves as normal science (Hockett1983:34):

... I am convinced that the full impact of the Gestalt view has not yet been felt. If we

can learn to take that approach in a consistent way, I believe many of the problems

that beleaguered us in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (and that have been largelyneglected between then and now) will turn out either to be spurious or to have simple

and satisfying solutions.

Hocket & Kuhn 11

This shift of paradigms from vitalism to structuralism, then, prompts us to seelanguage in a different way and in different places than before. Hockett(1983:40) summarizes his view of the reconceptualization of language:

Linguistics Linguisticsas as

Naturwissenschaft Geisteswissenschaft

Action ThoughtSocial Individual

Practice/Communicative Theory/Rehearsal

And he finally insists upon a physicalism (Hockett 1983:42):

I do mean that, in my view, there have been no developments either in linguistics or

in the scientific world as a whole demanding any major revision of the

Bloomfieldian physicalistic orientation ...

There is no crisis ...

Chapter 3

Ferdinand de SaussureIntroduction

1. IntroductionIf Saussure is responsible for the establishment of a linguistic paradigm, it

is his description of the linguistic sign that is the basis for such a claim. Ifthere is any single unifying concept among the varying schools and theories

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

of the twentieth century, it is the tacit assumption (no one finds it necessaryanymore to cite Saussure as the original source) of the dual, Janus-like natureof language, facing in one direction towards phonetics/sound and in the otherdirection toward meaning/semantics/content, etc. It is his derivation of thesign and the attendant attributes that has provided unity to linguistic theorizingover the past eighty-plus years.1

1 I know of only one widely accepted view of language which escapes this generalization. J.R. Firth and the London School of linguistics elaborated a concept of language from which

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2. OrientationSaussure develops his ideas from examination of a speech act — what

happens when (minimally) two people talk — and ironically perhaps arrives ata characterization that is completely other.2 Saussure’s schematicization ispresented in Figure 1. It is symmetrical in that both A and B act as speaker

Figure 1: Saussurean representation of a speech act.

or listener indifferently, but asymmetrical in that at a given time the two rolesare complementary. Assuming that A is speaking, several components of thisevent can be identified. First , there is a point in A where a ‘concept’ isassociated with a ‘sound image’; that point is delimited from the remainder aspsychological. Second, that portion within A wherein the sound image isconverted into muscular activity (articulation) is physiological; the remainderis not. Third , that portion of the speech act that consists of the sound itself,independent of both A and B, is physical. Fourth , that portion within Bwherein the sound is converted back into a sound image is physiological,lying between the ear and the point described next. Fifth , that point where thesound image is associated with a concept is finally psychological. Figure 2adds this partitioning to Figure 1. That portion described as physical is op-posed to the remainder in both A and B as outer (physical) to inner (physio-logical and psychological). Those portions described for both A and B wherethe ‘association’ is accomplished is contrasted to the remainder as psycholo-gical to non-psychological. Those portions where A associates a concept witha sound image, then converts the image into articulation, and finally the

the Saussurean sign is absent. The Prague School, Hjelmslevian glossematics, the work ofBloomfield and the American Structuralists (or Post-Bloomfieldians), Pikean tagmemics, andTransformational Generative Grammar in its various forms are all the direct intellectualinheritors of Saussure.

2 A similar inspection by Bloomfield — in his anecdote of Jack and Jill — beginsanalogously, but ends for Bloomfield with very different results (Bloomfield 1933:22-27).And recall Harris’ (1992) lament for the “ordinary” or “lay language user”.

Saussure: Introduction 3

resulting physical sound are collected to comprise the active portion of thechain. The remainder — lying entirely within B — is passive. The psycho-logically active is finally opposed to the psychologically passive as executiveto receptive.

As it turns out, Saussure finds language (langue) to be completelyother/different from these distinctions and elucidates his concept of languageby opposing its attributes to those he finds in this schematized speech act.Language is above all a social phenomenon while the speech act of Figure 1

Figure 2: Saussurean speech act partitioned.

is not, and it is from the social property that several additional characteristicsarise.3 Although the speech act would appear to be ‘social’, it is not, givenSaussure’s particular use of the term social, by which he intends thecollectivity of individuals. And language is social to the degree that it iscommon to that collectivity. It is the average. It is, as Saussure says, notcomplete in an individual , but is identified as the ‘overlap’ that unitesindividuals into that collective whole. The speech act, then, is not socialbecause it is unique and particular . It is individual and thereby opposed to thecollectivity wherein language is found. There is no collective speaking;“execution is never carried out by the collectivity” (Saussure 1959:13).

The introduction of social allows Saussure then to distinguish language(langue) from speech or speaking (parole), and it is just the latter which isrepresented in Figure 1. It is from this conception of a social language thatadditional differentiating properties arise. They are that:

3 Recall Hockett’s (1983) associating with Schleicher the idea that pattern may arise from thesocial nature of a phenomenon.

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Langue Parole

Nonwillful WillfulPassive Active

Homogeneous Heterogeneous

Both langue and parole may show their respective properties in several ways.

2.1 On the opposition of Active to PassiveLanguage having been separated from the speech act is passive, while the

latter is active. Parole is the use, the drawing upon the passive — thecollective sum or average. Language is passive ontogenetically, as well, in itsacquisition. It is a “storehouse” which is “filled” in the process of acquisition,and seeing language as “a storehouse filled [emph. mine, PWD] by membersof a given community” (Saussure 1959:13) gives language yet another sourcefor its nonwillfulness, i.e., its ontogeny.4

2.2 On the opposition of Willful to NonwillfulBecause speaking involves choice — selection — it is willful, not just in

the sense of choosing what to say, but also how and when (or whether)anything is said. Equivalently, speaking is a conscious activity, whereaslanguage is unconscious/nonwillful . Language never requires “premedita-tion” (Saussure 1959:14) while speaking does.

... reflection enters [language] only for the purpose of classification (Saussure1959:14).

The introspective examination of language is carried out by a linguist for thepurpose of description. Language is nonwillful, as well, because it cannot bealtered at will . This property is tied to the notion that language is social andbeyond the reach of the invididual, each speaker having only a portion of it(Saussure 1959:71 & 72):

The masses have no voice in the matter ... speakers are largely unconscious of the

4 Recall Hockett’s (1948) desire to reduce language to terms of a stimulus-responsemechanism and a central nervous system. This will produce a ‘storehouse’ filled in a ‘non-willful’ way just as in Saussure’s vision. Does Chomsky’s idea of a LAD have the samequalities as Saussure’s and Hockett’s views of acquisition ... or does it differ?


laws of language; and if they are unaware of them, how could they modify them?5

Recall from Hockett (1983:17):

Schleicher’s reasoning [concerning the absence of role of free will in determininglanguage change, PWD], never fully elaborated, was Hegelian in the same way aswas that of Karl Marx (1818-1883) at about the same time. Marx did not deny, forexample, that an individual entrepreneur can try to be a generous fellow if he sochooses. He argued only that the capitalist system — the interlockingrelationships among people within which their decisions lead to one or anotherresult — involves internal stresses forcing it as a whole to develop in a certainway, resulting ultimately in a relatively sudden system-changing outcome ...Whitney, true to the spirit of the American frontier, would have been much moreconcerned with the free-will nature of the individual decisions that lead (?) [Thisis Hockett’s “?”, PWD] to the collective consequence; Schleicher would havebeen more intrigued by what he thought was the inevitability of the consequences.

Hence, language is passive in a further way. Diachronically, while languagemay not be willfully changed by individuals, their behavior is nevertheless theunwilled source of language change. Language responds to changes inspeaking and may itself change.

2.3 On the opposition of Heterogeneity to HomogeneityThis opposition follows from several others. First , because language is a

social average, complete within a collectivity that excludes individualvariation, it projects ‘ideal’ speaker-listeners that are by definition homogene-ous. But notice that in Saussurean terms such ‘ideal’ speakers cannot (?) infact exist since each speaker will be partial , incomplete, and not ‘ideal’ inthat she will not represent the entirety of language. Second, because languageis opposed to willful speaking, speaking is heterogeneous, as a function ofindividuals, and individual occasions. Third , because language is not anactivity, a use, its localization must lie somewhere other than in the chain of

5 Cp. Whorf’s (1940:221) reference to “automatic, involuntary patterns of language”. It maybe noted here that Hockett himself (and others) attribute an absence of willfulness to soundchange because it occurs outside of awareness (Hockett 1965:202):

[sound change] is not REDUCIBLE to borrowing because the density distribution islargely altered by innumerable tiny imprecisions of pronunciation and by constantchannel noise ... that take place totally out of awareness.

Hockett (1965:191) sees the regularity of change in sound change itself and it is the socialcontext which produces any contradiction to the regularity. This view is the inverse of theone described in the quotation just below from Hockett (1983).

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activity that is speaking (Saussure 1959:14):

It can be localized in the limited segment of the speaking-circuit where anauditory image becomes associated with a concept.

I.e., it is psychological, existing in what Saussure terms the associativecenter. Its nature is homogeneously psychological while speaking remainscomposed of various kinds of phenomena — psychological, physiological,physical.

2.4 The implications of these propertiesUltimately, language is patterned and regular whereas speaking is irregular

and unpatterned. We may see this projection of language upon the collectivesociety as a continuation of the perception of sound change in the nineteenthcentury as outlined by Hockett (1983). The regularity there escaped from theindeterminateness of Geisteswissenschaft by conceiving change as a mass(social) phenomenon, which is beyond the reach of any individual to initiateor to alter. The notion of social is primary for Saussure and the otherproperties of language appear to follow from it. Yet from our point of view itleads to some odd conclusions.

Assuming that language derives its homogeneity from its social nature, weare directed to search for a homogeneous speech community where thathomogeneity will reside. Yet that search (e.g. linguistic geography) has notfound such a community.6 In the same search for homogeneity, Americanstructuralism begins with language and then fractures that concept intodialects, and then further into idiolects, and finally into styles.7 The curiousresult of that progression is that when homogeneity is ultimately found (?), thesocial property is lost. For Transformational Generative Grammar, any personwho knows the language can be an ideal speaker-listener; the language iscomplete in that individual. Homogeneity and social are not concomitantproperties in the American style of linguistics. The ‘language’ studied now isthe behavior of one speaker behaving in one style. Language is no longer acollective, and it is complete in the individual. Language is contextuallybound to usage, i.e., a specific style in a specific speech act, and is no longerthe usage-free thing it was for Saussure. It is circumscribed by the terms ofthat usage.

6 Cf. Saussure’s (1959:90) ‘idiosynchronic’.

7 Cf. Bloch (1947) and the description of the variants of English have: hæv, hæv, and v.


3. The signThe implementation of Saussure’s socially homogeneous language

depends upon his use of the sign, which is a composite of a concept and asound-image held together by a bond of mutual implication .8 This relationestablishes the concept as a signified and the sound-image as a signifier (cf.Figure 3 from Saussure 1959:114). Neither exists independently of theother as there is no up without the opposed down ... no left without thecontrary right . Both derive their existence relationally, rather than by theirown content.

Figure 3: A depiction of the sign relation.

The sign exists as a psychological reality independent of its manifestation,e.g. “phonemes ... which suggest[...] verbal activity ... is applicable to thespoken word only” (Saussure 1959:66). And (Saussure 1959:94):

The word-unit is not constituted solely by the totality of its phonemes but bycharacteristics other than its material quality [emp. mine, PWD].

Signs acquire their existence and their character not from their content, butfrom their place in a system, by their opposition to one another. Thematter/material that realizes them or the opposition is irrelevant.

The separation of the signs of language/langue from material expressionimplies a second property of signs, the famed arbitrariness of the bondbetween the signifier and signified. Given that language/langue existsindependently from its manifestation and that a signifier and signified taketheir status from that mutual relation, it matters not what signifier bonds with

8 But notice that the ‘bond’ may experience degrees of necessity (Saussure 1959:75):

Latin necare ‘kill’ became noyer ‘drown’ in French. Both the sound-image and theconcept changed; but it is useless to separate the two parts of the phenomenon; it issufficient to state with respect to the whole that the bond between the idea [i.e.,concept/signified] and the sign [i.e., sound-image/signifier] was loosened [emph. mine,PWD].

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what signified. This systemic arbitrariness is supported by the empiricalobservation that one cannot reason from sound-to-meaning nor from meaning-to-sound.9

4. Language/langue and the theoryLanguage/langue is a system of arbitrarily constituted signs, defined by

their opposition to other signs. Language is abstract, but it is not an ab-straction.10 Saussure takes care to emphasize the reality , the existence of thesystem of signs (Saussure 1959:107):

Language then has the strange, striking characteristic of not having entities thatare perceptible at the outset [i.e., abstract] and yet not permitting us to doubt thatthey exist [i.e., not abstractions] and that their functioning constitutes it.

Saussure adopts a realist’s position towards his object of study; he advocates aGod’s-truth belief in the actuality of langue and not a hocus-pocus attitude.

In denying the possibility of arriving at the system by means of a series ofanalyses, Saussure rejects an operational kind of theory and proposes atheory which is explanatory. There are several motivations for his position.First , because language/langue has an abstract (though real) existence andonly an arbitrary association with its realization, it is not possible to reasonfrom sound-image (or from concepts) to the sign.11 It is the (system of) sign(s)which order(s) and shape(s) sound-images and concepts; and without priorknowledge of the sign, one cannot know what portions to operate upon. Thesegmentation is not a given. Any structuring of sound or thought results fromprojecting the form of language/langue upon an otherwise formless purport.Cf. Figure 4 (Saussure 1959:112). Given A and B in Figure 4, it is notpossible to see their organizations unless they have been given before; but

9 This arbitrariness is found in American structuralism in the patternless associationbetween levels, e.g. in the connection between syntax/morphology and phonology. Cf.footnote 12. Grammar cannot be reduced to phonology (except arbitrarily) in the same waythat language cannot be reduced to physics/chemistry (except arbitrarily).

10 Recall my earlier use of ‘covert’.

11 This recurs in Chomsky’s (1960) advocating an explanatory theory in the face of animpenetrable blackbox, the LAD.


Figure 4: The relation of Saussurean form to substance.

that organization is just what an operational approach is trying to determine.12

Second, an operational discovery of the elements of language/langue wouldlead to an abstraction. Consideration of the French alternation between mwaand mwaz ‘month’, and attempting to establish a signifier would yield anabstraction which is the ‘link’ between the two, but is neither, and which hasno status in parole, nor in langue (Saussure 1959:105):

In mwa (mois, as in le mois de Septembre ‘the month of September’) and mwaz(mois, in un mois après ‘a month later’) there are also two forms of the same word,and there is no question of a concrete unit. The meaning is the same, but the slicesof sound are different. As soon as we try to liken the conrete units to words, weface a dilemma: we must either ignore the relation — which is nonetheless evident— that binds cheval and chevaux, the two sounds of mwa and mwaz, etc. and saythat they are different words, or instead of concrete units be satisfied with theabstraction that links [emph. mine, PWD] the different forms of the same word.13

The signifier component of the sign (cf. Figure 3) is an unresolved whole.

12 This recalls Hammarström’s (1978) distinction between internal and external and thedirect seizure of language through introspection (Hammarström 1978:20 & 22):

A linguist can study language externally. He may have to do so, or he may choose todo so, but in both cases his description will be at least somewhat wrong and incomplete... I have previously suggested ... that this kind of scrutinizing [of an internal object]involves intuition or introspection. Intuition would imply a more direct procedure: onecan immediately tell that in English the definite article always precedes ... the noun.

13 This dilemma looks forward to Hockett’s later trilemma (1961:30):

(1) Knife- and knive- are the same morpheme.(2) Knife- and knive- are phonemically different.(3) A morpheme is composed of phonemes.

One of the propositions must be false.

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Third , the discovery techniques would yield a list and not a system, thusmissing the structural essence of language/langue. And fourth , signs matchno entities of a fixed size in speaking. They are not uniquely equivalent to‘words’ (e.g. porte-plume), nor to ‘locutions’ (e.g. s’il vous plait), nor to‘sentences’. Beginning with one or the other, then, will not produce consistentidentification of the signs of the language system.

The theory is therefore explanatory. Saussure underscores — implicitly— that the explanation is a deductive one, not historical, and seeks to establisha synchronic linguistics. The explanation is not one of cause-and-effect, thatHammarström (1978:26) attributes to the natural sciences but the ‘weaker’deductive one. The system which Saussure suggests exists independent oftime ... it is unchanging ... thus cause-and-effect explanations can have nohome in language/langue. Given a sign relation as in Figure 3, the replacementof the content of the signifier, or the replacement of the signified will have noeffect upon the system as long as the system, i.e., the structural relationsremain unaltered (Saussure 1959:94):

... these transformations are basically alien to words and cannot touch theiressence.

One can see additional properties in language change which set the history oflanguage off from atemporal language and which void historical explanations.First , change affects only one term of the sign. It is phonetic or semantic, aswhen the pronunciation of Germanic gast/gasti ––> Gast/Gäste withoutchanging the semantics. The history of language does not deal with signs, and“to try to unite such dissimilar facts in the same discipline would be certainlya fanciful undertaking” (Saussure 1959:85). The patterns of language are notthose of change (Saussure 1959:93 & 104):

... if one speaks of law [i.e., pattern] in synchrony it is in the sense of arrangement[i.e., static], a principle of regularity ... [whereas] ...Diachrony supposes adynamic force through which a thing is produced, a thing executed.

Second, change like speaking is active; both are events. There will be no‘events’ in language/langue, only “the momentary arrangement of terms”(Saussure 1959:80 & 81):

The first thing that strikes us when we study the facts of language is that theirsuccession in time does not exist insofar as the speaker is concerned. He isconfronted with a state. That is why the linguist who wishes to understand a statemust discard all knowledge of everything that produced it and ignore diachrony.


Implicit in this is that whatever pattern Saussure adduces for language/langue,it will be static and taxonomic.

Chapter 4

SaussureThe Theory

1. IntroductionFirst, further on the data. In his conceptualizing language, Saussure has

already excluded a class of phenomena from consideration, namely, all thatassociated with speaking. Saussure eliminates — or at least seems to —additional realms from inclusion within language. This further exclusion restson two assumptions: first , the primacy of language over parole and second,his insistance that language is a system of signs. Since a sign is a mutualimplication of two terms — a signifier and a signified, neither without theother has status within language. Absent its existence in the sign, a signifier isnot linguistic; and the same is true of signifieds. To study a signifierindependently of a signified is to engage in a study of physiology; and asimilar attempt at independent study of a signified takes us into psychology(Saussure 1959:103):

A succession of sounds is linguistic only if it supports an idea. Consideredindependently, it is material for a physiological study, and nothing more than that.The same is true of the signified as soon as it is separated from its signifier.Considered independently, concepts like ‘house’ ... belong to psychology.

Saussure appears to have eliminated patterns of semantics and phonology

from language and given them to other fields, but notice as well that languageprojects a segmentation upon ‘thought’ and another upon ‘phonic substance’.(Figure 1 is a modified version from Saussure 1959:112.) Yet those segments,

Thought

Signs

PhonicSubstance

Figure 1: ‘Levels’ in Saussurean theory.

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each within its own realm — materially as ‘thought’-segments or ‘phonic’-segments, continue to lie outside language.

2. The theorySaussure suggests a different kind of existence for thought and sounds, an

interrelationship based on difference, whereas the relation which maintainsthe language system is the opposition of values (Saussure 1959:117 & 121):

Instead of preexisting ideas then, we find in all the foregoing examples valuesemanating from the system [of signs]. When they are said to correspond toconcepts it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined notby their positive content but negatively by their relations to other terms of thesystem. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not[Emphases mine, PWD] ... When we compare signs — positive terms — witheach other, we can no longer speak of difference; the expression would not befitting for it applies only to the comparing of two sound-images, e.g. father andmother, or two ideas, e.g. the idea ‘father’ and the idea ‘mother’; two signs, eachhaving a signified and signifier, are not different but only distinct. Between themthere is only opposition. The entire mechanism of language, with which we shallbe concerned later, is based on oppositions of this kind and on the phonic andconceptual differences that they imply.

Signifiers of distinct signs are mutually ‘different’, and similarly forsignifieds. The notion of ‘value’ is the functional equivalent of ‘contrast’ inBloomfieldian linguistics and in the following structural interpretation ofBloomfield. Neither of value nor contrast admits partial similarity. The tworelationships are absolutes. If signs X and Y have value they are entirelyunlike each other. There is no partial similarity. If X and Y contrast, they, too,are each absolutely and completely unlike the other ... on that level. If motherand father contrast as morphemes, they are absolutely unalike.1 Given thatsigns are positive units (mutual implications) of signifier/signified (whereasthe latter themselves are not), Saussure chooses ‘distinct’ to qualify therelation between signs and ‘different’ to characterize the mutual relationsbetween signifieds and signifiers.

1 The American interpretations of Saussurean value do, however, allow one to incorporatethe observation that there nevertheless appears to be some similarity between the twosigns/morphemes. But to do so requires an amplification of levels beyond the single one thatSaussure maintains. The similarities between mother and father are lodged first in thephonology that allows one to state a common occurrence of , , and /r/, and second in asemantics that permits one to recognize a common presence of <parent> in both mother andfather. Yet, on the level of morphology, mother and father remain absolutely unlike. Theyare unitary and not internally composite in exactly the same way that Saussure’s signs are.

SAUSSURE: The Theory 3

A different interpretation of this relation of physiology (and psychology)to language is possible. The American interpretations of Saussurean valueallow one to incorporate the observation that, for the absolutness of thecontrast, it nevertheless appears possible for there to be some similaritybetween the two signs/morphemes. But to recognize that pattern requires anamplification of levels beyond the single one that Saussure maintains. Thesimilarities between mother and father are lodged first in the phonology thatallows one to state a partial similarity based on a shared occurrence of , ,and /r/, and second in a semantics, that permits one to recognize a commonpresence of <parent> in both mother and father. Yet, on the level ofmorphology, mother and father remain absolutely distinct. They are unitaryand not internally composite in exactly the same way that Saussure’s signsare. This ‘looser’, ‘mediated’ interpretation of the sign leads to the standardtextbook schema of language represented in Figure 2.

Semantics

Grammar

Phonology

Figure 2: A common presentation of ‘levels’ in language.

There may be a system of signifiers and of signifieds, but Saussure seemsto find no pattern within them to discuss. There are no sames, no recurrences... properties which we recognize as diagnostic of pattern. There is nothing,therefore, to be said of them. Again signifieds and signifiers are in languageand participate in whatever pattern that may characterize language only byvirtue of their participation within signs. There is no independent study ofsemantics nor phonology. There is only something grammar-like, and bycomparison of Figure 1 with Figure 2, this theory of language has only onekind of pattern, and one level.

2.1 Size levelsThere exists a second limitation within the system of signs, i.e.

Saussure’s grammar. Frequently, grammar is conceived as a hierarchy withminimal units arranged into larger ones. The concern here is with the limitsplaced upon the larger domains of pattern. Traditionally, that largest unit is

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designated as the sentence, but Saussure notes that the most characteristicproperty of sentences is their chaoticness (Saussure 1959:106 & 124):

If we picture to ourselves, in their totality the sentences that could be uttered, theirmost striking characteristic is that they in no way resemble each other ... diversityis dominant ... it [the sentence] belongs to speaking, not to language.

But do all combinations of signs share in the chaos of grammar, or do someescape it and belong to grammar? If we propose a distinction between thosecombinations of signs that are not language and those that are, then we mustbe able to recognize which are which. Where, then, does the upper boundaryof sign combinations lie? It is not determinate. It exists where a language has(Saussure 1959:125)

registered a sufficient number of specimens

such that there exists a fixedness (Saussure 1959: 124 & 125):

(i) “pat phrases”, e.g. à quoi bon ‘What’s the use?’(ii) “idiomatic twists [that] cannot be improvised”, e.g. forcer la main à

quelqu’un ‘To force someone’s hand’(iii) “idiomatic twists ... furnished by tradition”, e.g. facilité : facile, but

difficulté : difficile, not *difficilité.2(iv) “syntagmatic types that are built upon regular forms”, e.g.

indécorable ‘undecoratable’ on the model of impardonnable,intolérable, infatigable, etc.3

The line is not drawn by ‘size’, but by the degree of fixed conventionality, andnot all utterances satisfy this criterion. “Speaking is characterized by freedomof combinations” (Saussure 1959:124). Apparently, most of syntax exhibitsthis freedom and is therefore excluded from Saussure’s theory of language.There can be no ‘creativity’ in Saussure’s concept of language/langue. It is bythe removal of this property — by grammaticization — that a combinationcrosses the boundary from speaking/parole and enters into language/langue.

2 “These idiomatic twists cannot be improvised; they are furnished by tradition” (Saussure1959.125).

3 A form like indécorable “already has a potential existence in language; all its elements arefound in [other] syntagms” (Saussure 1959.166)


Signs may have a rough correspondence to terms within traditionalgrammar as outlined in Figure 3. Saussure (1959:114) adopts the term ‘word’as a technical one to cover this diversity (Saussure 1959:113-14):

Being unable to seize the concrete entities or units of language directly, we shallwork with words. While the word does not conform exactly to the definition of thelinguistic unit ... it at least bears a rough resemblance to the unit and has theadvantage of being concrete, consequently we shall use words as specimensequivalent to real terms in a synchronic system, and the principles that weevolve with respect to words will be valid for entities in general [Emphasesmine, PWD].

Some sentences Phrases Morphologically complex words

Simple words

SIGN

Figure 3: Complexity within Saussurean signs.

A word, then, is a sign that corresponds to an utterance of indeterminatecomplexity, and his theory is now one of words.4

2.2 ValueThere are several properties that may be attributed to words, but the

primary one is still value. Saussure has used value to characterize therelationships between signs and Saussure reapplies value to words. As notedabove, value is analogous to the more familiar notion of contrast or non-identity. Saussure continues with the notion and reaches an extreme result.Words form a system by their being distinct from other words. It is value thatinterrelates words and yields the system he so insists upon. Saussure hasalready said that all content/matter is/functions as the manifestation of words/signs. How then to get at these words/signs if they have no content? A wordexists simply by its opposition to other words — a word is defined by what itis not. Consider Figure 4. In (a), we see three geometrical shapes, each not theother. We can understand (‘grasp’) them in that way by their contents as

4 The Saussurean ‘Word’ is the analog of the Chomskyan ‘S’.

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‘circle’, ‘square’, and ‘triangle’. In this version, they are unconnected unlesswe somehow add that relationship, e.g. ‘closed geometrical figures’. We canbuild a connection into (a) by converting it to (b), where each is designated bybeing not the others. We now know that ‘(not , not )’ is ‘ ’, that ‘(not ,

(not , not )

(not , not )(not , not )

⇒

(a) (b)

(d)

(c)

⇒

⇒

Figure 4: From substance to form.

not )’ is ‘ ’, and that ‘(not , not )’ is ‘ ’. The interrelationshipbetween the three is now part of the ‘display’ in (b); but we still require ‘’, ‘

’, and ‘ ’ for the construction of (b). We may try to get further from thespecific positive content of geometry and to create a more neutralinterrelationship as in (c). But we have still employed a three-way distinctionbetween ‘solid line’, long-dash line’, and ‘short-dash line’. If (c) is placed in astill larger context, we can recover/know which intersection is ‘’, which is ‘

’, and which is ‘ ’ by referring to the other (more distant) relationships,which are in turn known by their relationship to the others. Each dependsupon the others, and if any of them changes, then they will all changeidentities as well because they are the reflections of the relationships from onepoint within all those relationships (Saussure 1959:110 & 121):

... elements hold each other in equilibrium in accordance with fixed rules, [and]the notion of identity [e.g. ‘ ’] blends with that of value [e.g. ‘not , not ’]and vice versa ... whatever distinguishes one sign from another constitutes it.

Version (c) may now be replaced with (d), in which reference to differenttypes of lines is removed. The version of (d) is now maximally efficient(‘simple’) in requiring no positive primitive at all, no ‘’, no ‘ ’, no ‘ —’, no


‘- -’, etc. Just ‘not’ ... value. Language/langue is “a system of pure values”(Saussure 1959:111), pure relationships. According to Figure 1, language/langue “serve[s] as a link between thought and sound” (Saussure 1959:112)while partaking of neither (Saussure 1959:113):

Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thoughtcombine; their combination produces a form, not a substance.

This conclusion is the lauded one, which Hockett (1983) identifies withgranularity and pattern. Having divorced langue from substance and theindividual speaker, its science attains the stature of Naturwissenschaft.

Theories of language can be further characterized as to whether theyassume as primitives things that occur in their theory-free observation oflanguage, primitives which contain positive ‘real world’ content, e.g.phonetics or any portion of the human sensorium. Some do and some do not.Those that do have been called empiric (n.b. not empirical), and those whichdo not are non-empiric (n.b. not non-empirical).5 This opposition is one thatallows us to distinguish between and group conceptualizations of language,both American and other:

Non-Empiric Empiric

Saussure Prague SchoolHjelmslev Bloomfield/Post-Bloomfieldians

Firth TagmemicsStratificational Grammar Transformational Generative Grammar

Neurocognitive

This is a potential danger to a non-empiric theory. Saussure, by this attitude,permits his theory to be so abstract that it may be a theory of more thanlanguage (i.e., English, French, etc.). It is a theory of any system ofcommunication. If it is intended to be a theory of language alone, and todescribe what makes language, language, distinct from all other phenomena,then it is mistaken in admitting within its range things which obviously are notlanguage. The mesh of the theory is not sufficiently narrow to exclude them.

5 Cf. the relevant chapters in Davis 1973. Stratificational grammar has evolved into‘cognitive-stratificational’ grammar (cf. Copeland & Davis 1980), ‘relational network’linguistics (Lamb 1994), and finally into ‘neurocognitive’ (Lamb 1999.). It has retained thenon-empiric character identified here.

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The exclusion — if desired — may have been effected by assuming empiricprimitives (e.g. sound-images) or by assuming more or different patterns forlanguage. The patterns of words which Saussure attributes to language are,however, not specific to human language, and Saussure has a theory ofsemiological systems (semiology). Saussure has a theory more general thanany of the others we shall examine, but at the same time it says less in that itattributes less rich pattern to that range of applications.

3. Patterns within signsWe now turn to the pattern of words/signs that Saussure perceives in

language. He first observes that while language is arbitrary within the sign —i.e., there is no pattern — examining words/signs with respect to each other,there can be less than complete arbitrariness. There occur samenesses; andrecurrences are apparent. Language is partially motivated. “In languageeverything boils down to differences [Read ‘distinctions’ PWD] but also togroupings” (Saussure 1959:128). That recurrence reveals first a pattern that isassociative. Cf. Figure 5 (Saussure 1959:129). Within the system, it ispossible to recognize that not all is negatively constructed. Having recognized

Figure 5: A Saussurean depiction of an associative relationship.

that some words are now complex by their entering into an associativepattern, others will be simple. Complex words reveal a second, internalpatterning between their parts, a syntagmatic, both-and relationship. Theyconstitute syntagmatic solidarities (Saussure 1959:127).

Figure 5, of course, will require a reworking (or elaboration) of Figure 4.These samenesses will have to be constituted as additional signs within thesystem or the nature of system will have to be altered. Consider the followingset of data:

(1) heal (10) sixths(2) six (11) foul


(3) slow (12) sloth(4) merry (13) cloth(5) wide (14) sloths(6) sixth (15) wealth(7) health (16) cloths(8) well (17) filth(9) mirth (18) width

Figure 6 represents a possible partial description of the data, but not the only

slow

cloth

th

s

merry er

slow

est

RootStem

Noun

Adjective

Figure 6: Another representation of Saussurean pattern .

one because there are uncertainties both in the data and in the theory.Assuming that the patterns are to be attributed to English, we can first focuson how to incorporate the patterns composed by the curly braces. Cf. Figure 5and the slanted lines that radiate out from dé-faire. Does there exist in thesystem of signs the associative pattern that collects the stems that may occurbefore {th}? Or is there one that is the summarized occurrence before {s},whether complex six-th or simple cloth-? Or before {er est}? Notice that inFigure 5 dé is present four times and faire is also present four times ... and thatis without counting the potential of the two “etc.”. The depiction of Figure 5 is

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not an unambiguous description of the data. But the alternative requiressomething like Figure 6, in which paradigmatic (disjunction-based) classesappear, e.g., ‘root’, ‘stem’, ‘noun’, and ‘adjective’. But what is the systemicequivalent of Root, Stem, Noun, Adjective, etc.? Is it itself a sign? Saussure(1959:110) responds:

... to base the classifications on anything except concrete entities — to say, forexample, that the parts of speech are the constituents of language simply becausethey correspond to categories of logic — is to forget that there are no [Emphasismine, PWD] linguistic facts apart from the phonic substance cut into significantelements [e.g. Figure 2.].

The description depends upon a latent system (Saussure 1959:130), whichmust be a local configuration within the system of signs (Saussure1959:130):

Our memory holds in reserve all the more or less complex types of syntagms,regardless of their class or length, and we bring in the associative groups to fix ourchoice when the time for using them arrives. When a Frenchman says marchons!‘(let’s) walk!’ he thinks unconsciously of diverse groups of associations thatconverge on the syntagm marchons! The syntagm figures in the series betweenmarchons! and the other forms determines his choice; in addition, marchons! callsup the series montons! ‘(let’s) go up!’ mangeons! ‘(let’s) eat!’ etc. and is selectedfrom this series by the same process ... In reality the idea evokes not a form [i.e.no sign, PWD] but a whole latent system that makes possible the oppositionsnecessary for the formation of the sign.

Signs are it.6

[Version: September 14, 2005]

6 This less-than-maximally efficient description is ‘remedied’ in other theories, whichconstruct descriptions analogous to Figure 6. Recently (Davis 1993), views of language havebeen proposed in which a return to the ‘distributed’ descriptions of Saussure is advocated (cf.Fox 1994). The motivation is that there is no justification for the abstractions of Figure 6 andthat concepts of language which decline to invoke them are more exact conceptualizations oflanguage. Recognition that syntactic pattern is bound to and embedded within lexical matteris more common.

The Saussurean separation of form from substance and the implication of this separation(e.g. that the nature of the ‘substance’ itself injects no patterned relations into language) hasbeen partially rejected. In phonology (cf. Figure 2), for example, the ‘naturalness’ condition(Chomsky & Halle 1968) illustrates a systematic intrusion of phonic substance into langue.In semantics, the intrusion of substance is not generally acknowledged (but cf. Davis &Saunders 1989). Importing psychological constructs into discussion of language is not thesame as recognizing a role for the substance common to psychology and linguistics.

Chapter 5

SaussureLimitations and Uncertainties

1. IntroductionThere are several areas in Saussure’s conception/theory of language in

which we may see limitations and uncertainties. We have already seen thatSaussure appears to restrict the patterning of language to that of signs ...roughly equivalent to what we would now call morphology (includinglexemes). Second, where pattern, i.e., associative pattern, is recognized withinlanguage, it is expressed, seemingly, by clustering the signs which enter intothat pattern into one location within the system so that the relevant signs areadjacent to one another. This, however, leaves a problem in how thisexpression works more precisely. If the system of signs is created by the valueof signs, i.e., their being distinct from other signs, is the one sign in which weare interested distinct from all signs equally? That is, is it the intersection ofcontrasts with every other sign in the language? Compare the entry of Darn!into the system of English langue. There would appear to be no one sign towhich it has a closer relation than any other. Where the sign of our interestclearly has recurrences in complex signs, e.g. contaminat(e), contamination,contaminant, contaminator, recontaminate, etc. is the relation of contaminateto excite as direct a one as is the relation of darn to excite? Or is the relation ofcontaminate to excite mediated by contamination and excitation? If not, thenhow is the fact of associative relation registered into the system of signs that islanguage/langue? And if the mediated alternative is the case, then how willdarn be integrated into the system such that its relations will recognize theabsence of any associative relation?

The key to the distinction seems to be the recognition of the syntagmaticsolidarities. A sign may be the mutual implication of one signified with onesignifier or it may be the mutual implication of two (or more) signifiers withtwo (or more) signifieds. Darn will then have no relation with such asyntagmatic solidarity. But then what is it related to directly? The only answerwould seem to be every sign in the language/langue. Contamin would then be

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related to syntagmatic solidarities in which it also appears.1 But we still do notknow whether contaminat(e) has an immediate relation with excite or amediated one. It would seem to be that it must have the former. Otherwise,how would we in some principled way relate darn to excite while excludingcontaminat(e) from such a relation? Compare the three possibilities fromparole:

(1) Darn them!(2) Excite them!(3) Contaminate them!

Any pair seems as related (or unrelated) as any other. But if we accept this,then how can we distinguish the local presences of clusters of associativerelations from their absence? We must answer this question keeping in mindthat our own intuitive recognition of signs by their positive manifestations asconcepts and sound-images, e.g. [ ], is not available within language/langue. That naive recognition must have some systemic equivalent (formalexpression) within language/langue, but Saussure does not give us explicitanswers to such problems, and we are left to work them out for ourselves ...perhaps by extending the theory or, ultimately, by abandoning it for someother.

Notice that the introduction of paradigms, or disjunctive classes, wouldprovide the basis for such a response. But that response would violateSaussure’s constraint of theoretical realism in that such formal devices gobeyond the pattern which such a constraint will allow (Saussure 1959:137-38):

We can say that the sum of the conscious and methodical classifications made by the

grammarian who studies a language-state without bringing in history must coincide[Emphasis mine, PWD] with the associations, conscious or not, that are set up inspeaking. These associations fix word-families, inflectional paradigms, and

formative elements (radicals, suffixes, inflectional endings, etc.) in our minds.

2. UncertaintiesOne substantive area of uncertainty in this theory centers upon the extent

to which associative relations are to be attributed to language/langue.Speaking of the Latin forms , , and (Saussure1959:138):

1 I leave it as an unresolved problem just how we recognize that contamin is the firstmember of the syntagmatic solidarity contaminant, but the second member of recontaminate.

SAUSSURE: Uncertainties 3

The sounds of the three endings offer no basis for association, yet the endings areconnected by the feeling [!, PWD] that they have a common value which prescribes

an identical function. This suffices to create the association in the absence of any

material support and the notion of the genitive takes its place in the language[Emphasis mine, PWD].

This may establish a single, simple sign and not an associative series becausethe signified is also simple, i.e., ‘the notion of genitive’. Cf. Figure 1. Thesuppletive relations between signifiers are no problem within this theory.Since the theory is non-empiric, the positive association of a signifier(s) ofidentical, similar, or completely different sound images is irrelevant for theconstitution of a sign, although methodologically it may be important.Although the example in Figure 1 is an ‘inflectional ending’ and maytherefore be cast as an associative relation rather than a sign relation, suchvariations as go ~ went would almost certainly involve a common sign. Theuncertainty here is that between pattern as an associative relation or patternas a sign.

Figure 1: Suppletion.

The same problem exists in considering a many-to-one relation between Aand B (Saussure 1959:104):

Take the two French phrases laf rsdüvã (la force du vent ‘the force of the wind’),

and abudf rs (a bout de force ‘exhausted’; literally ‘at the end of one’s force’). In

each phrase the same concept coincides with the same phonic slice, f˛ors; thus it is

certainly a linguistic unit [i.e. sign, PWD]. But in (il me force a parler

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‘he forces me to talk’) f˛ors has an entirely different meaning; it is therefore anotherunit [i.e. another sign, PWD].

The semantic distinction of ‘noun’ : ‘verb’ is the basis for the “entirelydifferent meaning”, and it is sufficient here to maintain a distinction betweentwo signifieds and therefore between two signs. But (Saussure 1959:108):

In the same vein, a word can express quite different ideas without compromising its

identity (cf. French adopter une mode ‘adopt a fashion’ and adopter un enfant

‘adopt a child’, la fleur du pommier ‘the flower of the apple tree’ and la fleur de la

noblesse ‘the flower of the nobility,’ etc.

Figure 2: Polysemy.

In separating n from v, Saussure seems to recognize obliquely thepresence of a signified ‘noun’ and ‘verb’ by permitting them to consistentlyseparate homonyms of this sort into two signs; while within the boundary of‘verb’, adopter1 and adopter2 are perceived as the same signifier althoughthey “express quite different ideas”.

A constant uncertainty here (as is polysemy in the discussion of anylanguage) will be how to best recognize the boundary between the relation inFigure 2 and that in Figure 3. Saussure’s methodological response to theissue is (1959:108):

... there is identity because the same slice of sound carries the same meaning in the

two sentences. But that explanation is unsatisfactory, for if the correspondence of

slices of sound and concepts is proof of identity ... [as in the noun senses of force in


Figure 3], the reverse is not true. There can be identity without this correspondence[e.g. Figures 1 and 2].

The boundary between the two cases, however, must be established in eachcase (Saussure 1959:138):

... we never know exactly whether or not the awareness of speakers goes as far asthe analyses of the grammarian. But the important thing is that abstract entitiesare always based in the last analysis on concrete entities. No grammaticalabstraction is possible without a series of material elements as a basis, and in theend we must always come back to these elements.2

Figure 3: Homonymy.

In practice, the semantic side of the sign leans more heavily on the“awareness of the speaker”, and the phonic side relies upon the presence of“material form”. Together, they suggest resolutions to these problems, but

2 This reliance upon ‘concrete’ appears to be literal and not just confined to ‘awareness of thespeakers’ (Saussure 1959:139):

In English, the man I have seen apparently uses a zero-sign to stand for a syntacticalfact which French expresses by que ‘that’ (l’homme que j’ai vu). But the comparing ofthe English with the French syntactical fact is precisely what produces the illusion thatnothingness can express something. The material units alone [Emphases mine PWD]actually create the value by being arranged in a certain way ... a meaning and functionexist only through the support of some material form.

Old men and women (Wells 1947) would be a problem here.

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because the theory is not an operational one, the product of their applicationmust finally be judged as to the accuracy of the representation oflanguage/langue which the linguist perceives; the correct one will “coincide[Emphasis mine, PWD] with the associations, conscious or not, that are set upin speaking” (Saussure 1959:138).3 The correctness of the grammar cannot berecognized internally to itself.

There are without doubt uncertainties in the Saussurean paradigm andareas to be worked through. As Kuhn suggests, this may be counted adesirable aspect of a paradigm; it is suggestive of issues which require furtherthought. Three areas of ambiguity in Saussure’s theory are:

(i) Size-levels within the one level, e.g. morphology versus syntax.(ii) The amount of pattern within the size-levels of grammar that are

recognized, e.g. form classes.(iii) Levels, e.g. phonology versus grammar versus semantics, etc.

We have discussed (i) and (ii). With respect to (iii), Saussure has claimed thatthe only relationship among both the signifieds and among the signifiers isdifference, by virtue of their participation in distinct signs. Yet (Saussure1959:126):

... the association [i.e. associative relation, PWD] may spring from the analogy of the

concepts signified (enseignement, instruction, apprentisage, éducation, etc.); or

again, simply from the similarity of the sound images (e.g. enseignement and

justement ‘precisely’). Thus there is at times a double similarity of meaning and

form, at times similarity only of form or of meaning. A word can always evoke

everything that can be associated with it in one way or another.

Cf. Figure 4 from Saussure (1959:126). Such a statement gives a strong indication that there is an associative pattern to be found within the signifieds andwithin the signifiers, a pattern which follows after their establishment inthose respective capacities by their participation in the sign. Such patterns —while common sense from our perspective — are only suggested within theSaussurean theory.4 Notice that, from the examples given, the phonological

3 Does this mean that language is not ‘pure form’?Looking forward to Transformational Generative Grammar and its triad of observational,

descriptive, and explanatory adequacy, we can see a (perhaps unintended) reflection ofSaussure’s criteria in the TGG criteria of observational and descriptive adequacy.

4 Cf. the discussion of ‘value’ and ‘contrast’ in Chapter 4.


pattern exists only to the point of recognizing syllables, e.g. mã in clémentand justement. Further resolution of these into m and ã is not considered.Associative patterns within signifiers appear to hold only between signifiers

Figure 4: Pattern at more than one level.

of complex signs, i.e., signifiers of signs which participate in a syntagmaticsolidarity. Thus, the mon ‘my’ and monter ‘to climb’ may not enter into anassociative relation because of some “analogy” in their signifiers, mõ andmõte. Perhaps our awareness as speakers does not extend that far.5

3. ConclusionIn Davis (1973:36-37), I attempted to summarize the accumulated

observations on Saussure in a more formal way:

Primitives:1. Nonidentity, value relationships2. Linearity3. Conjunction4. Mutual implication

Definitions 1. Word system: Defined in terms of mutual implication holding

between conjunctions of two systems that are in turn defined

5 This peripheral presence of associative relationships among the signifieds and the signifierssuch that each is dependent first upon their involvement within the system of signs gives aneven more Saussurean cast to Transformational Generative Grammar (cf. footnote 3), whichsimilarly begins with the syntactic component (system of signs) and then interprets the output(signifieds and signifiers) by mapping a part (signifieds) onto a semantic reading (concepts)and another part (sound image) onto a phonetic transcription (phonic substance).

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by conjunctions of nonidentity relationships. 2. Syntagmatic solidarity : Defined as the relationships of

mutual implication holding between n elements of the wordsystem in which n ≥ 3 and n -1 of the terms are linearlyrelated.

3. Complex word: Defined as the element of a syntagmaticsolidarity with no linear relation with the other elements of thesyntagmatic solidarity.

4. Simple words: Defined as (a) the linearly related elements of asyntagmatic solidarity or (b) elements of the word system notrelated by syntagmatic solidarity.

5. Analysis: Defined in terms of word system, syntagmaticsolidarity, complex word, and simple words.

6. Associative relationship: Defined in terms of (a) complexwords analyzed such that at least one of the simple words ofeach is the same (e.g. burglary and burglarize), or (b) acomplex word and a simple word such that they are related bysyntagmatic solidarity (e.g. burglar and burglary or ry andburglary), or (c) the relationship between simple signs if thecomplexity of signifieds and signifiers is admitted.

7. Syntagmatic relationship: Defined in terms of simple wordsrelated to the same complex word by syntagmatic solidarityand to one another by linearity.

Within such a theory, an accounting will now consist of the following:

1. A definition of a word system2. A definition of the complex and simple words3. A definition of analysis holding between the complex and

simple words4. A statement of the associative relationships of minimum

words holding between them as elements related tocomplex words

5. A statement of the syntagmatic relationships of minimumwords holding between them as elements related tocomplex words

6. An interpretation of statements (1) - (5) such that theelements and statements given there predict the signs andpatterns, and only those, in the data


7. An evaluation of the extent to which (6) is met and areworking of (1) - (5) until (6) is met and the correct dataare predicted.


Chapter 6

Bloomfield & SaussureSamenesses and Differences

1. IntroductionBloomfield’s (1933:22-24) interpretation of the speech act is derived from

a ‘typical’ scenario in which two individuals engage in a short conversationone requesting the other for an apple and the second complying ... notresponding linguistically ... with the request:

Suppose that Jack and Jill are walking down a lane. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple

in a tree. She makes a noise with her larynx, tongue, and lips. Jack vaults the fence,climbs the tree, takes the apple, brings it to Jill, and places it in her hand. Jill eats the

apple.

Note that there is no record of what language Jill speaks ... or even whether

she speaks a language; she “makes a noise”. If language resides somewhere inthis experience, we see immediately see that we stand outside it. We hearonly ‘noise’ without any idea of what, or whether, the noise ‘means’. UnlikeSaussure, we must burrow our way into language and discover its presence,rather than working our way out from within it. Saussure’s statement that it is

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the point of view that creates the object is acted out again here ... but the pointof view is decidedly different.

There may be many reasons for this turn. It is common to cite theexperience of linguists in North America with the indigenous languages,especially Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his students (notably Edward Sapir[1884-1939] and Alfred Kroeber [1876-1960]), who each worked on severalindigenous languages.1 Boas worked on languages of the northwest coast, e.g.Bella Coola (Salishan) in the 1870’s and later, Nootka (Wakashan). Sapirworked on languages of Canada (Sarcee [Athabaskan] and Cree [Algonkian]),

1 There were a complex of forces which produced the concentrated investigation of AmericanIndian languages. In 1840, James Smithson bequeathed $500,000 to the United Statesgovernment to establish an institution “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge amongmen” (Hinsley 1981:17). It was called the National Institute until Congress created theSmithsonian Institution in 1846. Circumstance contrived to cast a significant portion of itsresearch on the American Indian. Expeditions by amateur scientists yielded collections thatdemanded museums to house them. Second, ethnologists of the time focussed on what seemedto make the country unique. In 1846, “the respected ethnologist” Henry Rowe Schoolcraftadvocated development of (Hinsley 1981:20):

... an American scientific and literary tradition: “No people can bear a true nationality,which does not exfoliate, as it were, from its bosom, something that expresses thepeculiarities of its own soil and climate”. In constructing its “intellectual edifice”America must draw “from the broad and deep quarries of its own mountains, foundationstones, and columns and capitals, which bear the impress of an indigenous geognosy”.

The native American Indians had borne this distinctive “mental geognosy”, and thepresent tribes, “walking statues” of their progenitors, were monuments far more worthyof study than the antiquarian remains of the Old World.

An in justifying a recommendation to the Institute to publish a Dakota dictionary andgrammar, the secretary of the Institute, William W. Turner, replied in 1851 (Hinsley1981:49):

Scientific study of the aboriginal tongues ... rewarded the comparative philologist byshowing not only analogies with other languages of the world but fascinatingpeculiarities as well, by disclosing “new and curious phases of the human mind” ... thestudy of Indian tongues, even without their literature, provided the same kind of“delight and instruction” that the naturalist enjoyed from a new species of plant oranimal.

The Institution supported expeditions, notably those by John Wesley Powell to the West andSouthwest and George Gibbs to the Northwest. In 1879, Powell successfully lobbiedCongress to establish the Bureau of American Ethnology within the Smithsonian, and “theBAE was the only institution in the country willing to underwrite and publish the work inlinguistics and mythology that Boas considered integral to a complete science ofanthropology” (Hinsley 1981:251). Boas, himself, had a varied career which began in theUnited States in the mid-1880’s as geographical editor for Science. Before he finally settledin 1895 in New York at Columbia University and the American Museum, he engaged infieldwork, taught at Clark University (1889-1992), did museum work in Chicago until spring1894, and for the eighteen months before the Columbia appointment was apparentlyunemployed (Hinsley 1981:250-51).

BLOOMFIELD & SAUSSURE 3

in California (Yana), and in the southwest (S. Ute). And Kroeber, primarily

Frans Boas 1905

an anthropologist chairing the department at UCBerkeley, worked onCalifornia languages. Sapir continued the tradition with his students (e.g.Stanley Newman [1905-1984], Morris Swadesh [1909-1967]2, Mary Haas[1910-1996], etc.). Newman worked primarily on languages of the southwest(e.g. Yokuts), but, like Boas, he also worked on Bella Coola (1934). MaryHaas, who spent most of her career at UCBerkeley, worked on languages ofthe northwest (Nitinat [with M. Swadesh]), southeast (Muskogean), andCalifornia. During WWII, she worked extensively on Thai. Bloomfieldworked on Algonkian (central and eastern Canada, and north central andnortheast USA), esp. Menomini. During WWII, Bloomfield had primaryresponsibility for Russian (under the punning pseudonym “I. M. Lesnin”). Fora person trained in comparative Germanic or Indo-European, contact withthese languages cannot fail to make the impression that they are ‘other’ and to

2 “Even before receiving his doctorate at the age of twenty-four, he had worked with severalAmerican Indian languages (Nez Perce, Nitinat, Chitimacha) and had collaborated with Sapiron a monograph ... The early 1950’s were painful years for Swadesh. In his briefprobationary appointment at CCNY (1948-49), he had embarrassed the administrativepowers by vigorously championing student demonstrators. Being a man of powerfulconvictions, he was inclined to be as uncompromising in battle for social or political idea ashe was in advancing a linguistic theory. As a result of this episode and of other lesspublicized ones, he became labeled unambiguously as a ‘leftist’ during the noisiest period ofthe McCarthy Era, and university administrators were unwilling to take the risk of hiringhim” (Newman 1967.948, 949).

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emphasize the fact that the linguist is approaching the task as an ‘outsider’. Itis this perspective which inclines one to take language as the external act ofspeaking rather than the internal knowledge which enables it.

Another source of this alternative view lies in these remarks (Bloomfield1933:34):

It is a mistake, for instance, to suppose that language enables a person toobserve things for which he has no sense organs, such as the workings ofhis own nervous system.

Because we cannot expect to gain insight from the speaker’s knowledge of thelanguage (Saussure’s “awareness of the speaker” , the speaker’s “feeling”, andHammerström’s “intuition” of the linguist), there is a resultant emphasis uponhow we go about working our way into the language. Here, Bloomfieldbecomes programmatic, and it is left to other workers in this model toelaborate the techniques (Bloomfield 1933:78 & 79):

In the case of a strange language we have to learn such things [whether two instances

of forms are the same, PWD] by trial and error, or to obtain the meanings from some

one that knows the language ... [A] little practice [Emphasis mine, PWD] will

enable the observer to recognize a phoneme when it appears in different parts of

words.

Yet Bloomfield does establish a ‘policy’ concerning the gathering of data.Unlike Saussure who saw only variation in the individual and therefore placedlanguage/langue in the ‘average’ of the society, Bloomfield extends thetightness of fit ... the arbitrariness, which characterizes the Saussurean sign, tothe behavior of individuals in their performance (Bloomfield 1933:37):

... there is another and simpler way [in addition to the statistical] of studyinghuman action in the mass: the study of conventional actions [Emphasis mine,PWD] ... Here the linguist is in a fortunate position: in no other respect are theactivities of a group as rigidly standardized as in the forms of language. Largegroups of people make up all their utterances out of the same stock of lexicalforms and grammatical constructions. A linguistic observer therefore can describethe speech-habits of a community without resorting to statistics.

Such a collocation as “conventional actions” would appear strange within aSaussurean model, for it is the actions themselves which are assumed to bechaotic. Convention applies to language/langue, and behavior, the actions ofspeaking/parole, are individual and ungoverned by convention. Bloomfield,


however, must make such an assumption.

2. The act of speechGiven the prior position about the issue of an ‘entry’ into language and the

conclusion that we must work our way into it from without, such a directionwill result in isolated and unpatterned data without the assumption ofconventional actions.3 Without it, we cannot proceed as a science becausethere will be no pattern. Yet Bloomfield must also recognize that thecorrelation between speech-utterances and practical events is variable; hepersists in extending the (potential) constancy of pattern to this aspect oflanguage as well. And he does it by adhering to the LaPlacean view ofdeterminacy described in Hockett 1983 (Bloomfield 1933:32-33):

The mechanism which governs speech must be very complex and delicate. Even if

we know a great deal about a speaker and about the immediate stimuli which are

acting upon him, we usually cannot predict whether he will speak or what he will say

... The materialistic (or, better, mechanistic) theory supposes that the variability of

human conduct, including speech, is due only to the fact that the human body is a

very complex system ... We could foretell a person’s actions ..., only if we knew the

exact structure of his body at the moment ... at birth or before –– and then had arecord of every change in that organism, including every stimulus that had ever

affected the organism.

Bloomfield’s attitude leaves only certain portions of the interactionbetween Jack and Jill as subject for linguistic study. Bloomfield segments thisexperience into three portions (Bloomfield 1933:23):

A. Practical events preceding the act of speechB. Speech.C. Practical events following the act of speech.

Notice the difference between Bloomfield’s interpretation of the act of speechand Saussure’s. Saussure’s concern lay in activity which would be completelysubsumed in the ‘B’ portion of Bloomfield’s act of speech. The increased

3 This ‘constructive’ approach to language is directly reflected in Bloomfield’s (1926:154)‘Assumption 1’: “Within certain communities successive utterances are alike or partly alike”.Note well the un-Saussurean emphasis upon sameness/identity and not upon difference ordistinctness. Initially, everything strikes the ear as distinct; and this approach succeeds only ifit can produce/recognize identities.

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complexity in Bloomfield’s notion is required precisely because of hisorientation to language as an outsider. The association between a thought andits phonic representation for Saussure is found in the heads of the speaker andhearer, but for Bloomfield that cannot exist ... or it cannot exist in a way that itcan be accessed and made the object of study. In its place we find theexternalized ... and observable ... addenda of ‘A’ and ‘C’, i.e., “practicalevents”. As outsiders to language, there is no way to avoid this alteration, forit is here that we encounter language. Figure 1 depicts the relation betweenSaussure’s notion of the act of speech and Bloomfield’s.

EVENTSPRACTICAL

EVENTSPRACTICAL

A B C

Figure 1: The act of speech for Saussure and Bloomfield.

Examining the events in Bloomfield’s representation, he notes that it ispossible for A and C to occur without B. The events of ‘A’ constitute thestimulus for the act of speech but may prompt another act (Bloomfield1933:24), i.e., Jill herself may retrieve the apple. And B may not appear. Sucha connection of A with C, without the possibility of B, is the condition ofspeechless animals; “The lone Jill is in much the same position of thespeechless animal” (Bloomfield 1933:24). In this condition, the occurrence isrepresented as in (1):

(1) S ––––> R

‘S’ is the practical stimulus for some activity and ‘R’ is the practicalreaction to that stimulus. But (Bloomfield 1933:24):

Instead of struggling with the fence and the tree, she made a few small movementsin her throat and mouth, which produced a little noise. At once, Jack began tomake the reactions for her; he performed actions that were beyond Jill’s strengthand in the end Jill got the apple. Language enables one person to make a reaction(R) when another person has the stimulus (S).

The interposition of those ‘movements’ have great effect culminating in “thewhole working of society” (Bloomfield 1933:24, 26, & 28):


In the ideal case, within a group of people who speak to each other, each personhas at his disposal the strength and skill of every person in the group. The morethese persons differ as to special skills, the wider a range of power does each oneperson control. Only one person needs to be a good climber, since he can get fruitfor all the rest; only one needs to be a good fisherman, since he can supply theother with fish. The division of labor, and, with it, the whole working of humansociety, is due to language ... The gap between the bodies of the speaker andhearer –– the discontinuity of the two nervous systems –– is bridged by the sound-waves ... The term society or social organism is not a metaphor. A human socialgroup is really a unit of a higher order than a single cell. The single cells in themany-celled animal co-operate by means of such arrangements as the nervoussystem; the individuals in a human society co-operate by means of sound-waves.

Rather than language depending upon society for its character, in the mannerof Saussure, the relation is now reversed, and language is here the source ofthe integrity of society.4 The position between the two is altered so that it islanguage which is prior to society (Bloomfield 1933:29):

A group of people who use the same system of speech-signals is a speech-community.

Again, the relation between language and its context is just the reverse ofSaussure’s. With the interposition of speech, r · · · s, (1) is amplified into (2):

(2) S ––––> r · · · s ––––> R

in which ‘s’ is “speech (or substitute) stimuli” (Bloomfield 1933:25). Now Rmay follow S or s. And because “the reaction mediated by speech can takeplace in the body of any person who hears the speech” (Bloomfield 1933:26):

The gap between the bodies of the speaker and the hearer — the discontinuity ofthe two nervous systems — is bridged by the sound-waves.

And this finally is where the linguist finds his/her data (Bloomfield 1933:32):

... the linguist deals only with the speech-signal (r · · · s); he is not competent todeal with problems of physiology or psychology.

4 Compare Saussure's projection of language onto 'thought' and 'speech'. Bloomfield projectsit onto 'human society'.

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Language, once more, is what knits society together; language is primaryhere. The speech occurrence or speech event (r · · · s) by itself attracts noattention, and “the normal human being is interested only in S and R; thoughhe uses speech, and thrives by it, he pays no attention to it”. We as linguistsare interested precisely in that event (Bloomfield 1933:27):

worthless in itself

But we are interested in it because (Bloomfield 1933:27):

it has a meaning

And that ‘meaning’ is constituted in the practical events of S and R(Bloomfield 1933:27):

When anything unimportant turns out to be closely connected with more important

things, we say that it has, after all, a ‘meaning’; namely, it ‘means’ these more

important things’. Accordingly, we say that speech-utterance, trivial and unimportant

in itself, is important because it has a meaning: the meaning consists of the important

things with which the speech-utterance (B) is connected, namely the practical events(A and C).

3. ConclusionWe come around to a position, finally, similar to Saussure’s, yet with a

clearly different Bloomfieldian character:

signified practical events| |

signifier speech-utterance

Figure 2: The sign for Saussure and Bloomfield.

But in place of signs, Bloomfield has forms (Bloomfield 1926:155):

6.Def. The vocal features common to same or partly same utterances are forms; the

corresponding stimulus-reaction features are meanings. Thus a form [sign, PWD] is a recurrent vocal feature [signifier, PWD] which has

meaning [signified, PWD], and a meaning is a recurrent stimulus-reaction feature

which corresponds to a form.


And (Bloomfield 1933:27):

To study this co-ordination of certain sounds with certain meanings [i.e., forms,

PWD] is to study language.


Chapter 7

BloomfieldThe Shape of the Theory

1. IntroductionSimilar to Saussure, Bloomfield (1926) sets out a series of statements

which identify an initial conception of language.1 His initial primitives derivefrom an act of speech, which Bloomfield accepts from the fields ofpsychology and anthropology.2 Even so, to begin with, we do not knowwhich acts represent speech and which do not. That is resolved only whensome of acts are determined to be forms and some are not.

2. The Creation of the TheoryIn a series of assumptions and definitions, Bloomfield establishes the

existence of utterance, language, and form (Bloomfield 1926:154-55):

1. Definition . An act of speech is an utterance ...

Assumption 1. Within certain communities successive utterances are

alike or partly alike3 ...

3. Def. Any such community is a speech-community ...

1 Bloomfield (1926.154) wirtes, “I am indebted to Sapir’s book on Language, New York1921, and to de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale,3 Paris 1922; both authors takesteps toward a delimitation of linguistics.”

2 Cf. Chapter 6.

3 In Bloomfield (1933), this assumption is stated more specifically as follows (p. 144):

In certain communities (speech-communities) some speech-utterances are alike as toform and meaning.

And Bloomfield remarks (1933:145) that “our fundamental assumption implies that eachlinguistic form has a constant and specific meaning”. It is the failure of this implication (i.e.,the absence of a constant and specific meaning) which may be the most serious weak pointof this and similar theories. Bloomfield recognizes the limitations of this assumption as well:“... our basic assumption is true only within limits, even though its general truth ispresupposed not only in linguistic study, but by all our actual use of language”.

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4. Def. The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech-community is the language of that speech-community4 ...

5. Def. That which is alike will be called same. That which is not same i s

different ...

6. Def. The vocal features common to same or partly same utterances are

forms; the corresponding stimulus-reaction features are meanings ...

Assumption 2. Every utterance is made up wholly of forms.

There are two points here. First , the relation of ‘same’ (né ‘alike’) and‘different’ are assumed and not defined. There is no definition of ‘alike’;it is a primitive applied to vocal features and to stimulus-reactionfeatures without instruction on how to recognize it. It is either there or itis not. Since there are no techniques presented for introducing it, and itmust be assumed that we can recognize ‘alike’. The elaboration of themissing techniques and their incorporation constitute much of the lateractivity in developing this theory. Second, language is identified herewith the totality of utterances that can be made. It is not equated withthe patterns which the utterances exhibit, and which, when expanded,account for (generate) those utterances. It is the forms themselves.Language is not thought of as a system, pregnant with all the potentialforms of language. This is similar in outline to Saussure’s notion of asystem of signs in which all information is represented without removalof redundancies.5

2.1 The pattern of morphemes and sememesHaving identified the substance of language, Bloomfield then proceeds

to deal with forms in two ways: ‘morpheme, word, phrase’ in section III and‘phonemes’ in section V. In a series of definitions, Bloomfield (1926:155-56)provides succinct characterizations of our now common terminology:

8. Def. A minimum X is an X which does not consist entirely of lesser

X’s ...

4 Note again that ‘community’ is constructed from (and depends upon) the constancy oflanguage (i.e., “successive utterances are alike or partly alike”) and note that this reverses theprogression that Saussure proposed, in which ‘community’ was prior.

5 Notice, also, that this conception of language (as equivalent to the totality of its possibleutterances) is consistent with the outsider’s approach to the phenomenon. This attitude againmirrors the American encounter with languages alien to Indo-European. There is an implicitemphasis on corpus and linearity.

BLOOMFIELD: The Shape of the Theory 3

9. Def. A minimum form is a morpheme; its meaning is a sememe ..10. Def. A form which may be an utterance is free. A form which is not

free is bound ...

11. Def. A minimum free form is a word ...

12. Def. A non-minimum free form is a phrase ...

13. Def. A bound form which is part of a word is a formative ...

Assumption 3. The forms of a language are finite in number.

Recalling that a form is a selection of vocal features, what this series ofdefinitions does is describe one organization of the act of speech, i.e. thevocal features. It does this first by identifying minimum forms, bound andfree, and then by organizing the minimum free forms into phrases by an ‘is a’relationship.6 Thus, a linear continuum of vocal features may have anorganization/pattern of segmentation projected upon it as we recognizeminimum forms (the initial segments of vocal features), and then therelationships of bound and free, and the boundaries of non-minimum forms.Figure 1 is a depiction of this relationship. The sine-wave shape may be takenas the continuum of vocal features; and upon them is projected a segmentationinto forms by virtue of certain portions of them being a “recurrent vocalfeature which has a meaning” (Bloomfield 1926:155). The hierarchicallayering of Figure 1 — at this point — is a convenience of representation. Asstated in the above series of definitions, morpheme, word, and phrase may beprojected separately and independently upon some portion of the vocalfeatures, but they may overlap in those features. The phrase the grandsonsand the word grandson may then segment the same vocal features as themorphemes grand and son. Consider the four layers of boxes to be conflated,the second row (grandsons) on top of the bottom (grandson), the third row

6 Comparing this to Saussure, Bloomfield’s forms find an analogue in Saussure’s words.Each is a variable in terms of its extent. Bloomfield’s forms may be minimal and bemorphemes, middling and be phrases, or maximum and be sentences. Saussure’s words maybe minimum and be signs or they be be more inclusive and be (fixed) phrases or wholesentences.

The organization of Bloomfield’s vocal features and of Saussure’s sound-images alsohave a similar basis. For Bloomfield, vocal features exist by virture of the act of speech andfor Saussure, the sound image exists “only if it supports an idea” (Saussure 1959.103). Sapir(1925.37-38) echoes this. He considers the sound [φ] to be non-language when used to blowout a match, but part of language when it assists in the pronunciation of an utterance. In theformer performance, “The production of the candle-blowing sound is a directly functionalact.” (38) The is its own meaning. “The candle-blowing wh means business,” whereas inthe performance of when, the sound “is merely a link in the construction of a symbol [i.e.sign or form, PWD].” Where language is present, the relation between sound-symbol, vocalfeatures, and sound and thought, stimulus-reaction features, and meaning is mediated bysign, form, or symbol.

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(the grandsons) on top of that, and so forth to yield a kind of Chinese-boxarrangement.

The grand son s climb ed down

Figure 1: Depiction of the projection of segmenting organizationupon an utterance.

2.2 The pattern of phonemesIn Figure 1, it is the projection of the morphemic meanings alone —

sememes or ‘recurrent stimulus-reaction features’ — upon the vocal featuresthat results in the pattern. Another pattern is identified by the following seriesof assumptions and definitions in section V (Bloomfield 1926:157):

15. Assumption 4. Different morphemes may be alike or partly alike as tovocal features ...

16. Def. A minimum same of vocal feature is a phoneme or distinctive sound ...7

Assumption 5. The number of different phonemes in a language is a

small sub-multiple of the number of forms ...

Assumption 6. Every form [each of which by Def. 6 is “vocal features

common to same or partly same utterances”] is made up wholly of

phonemes ...

7 Emphasis on linearity concentrates American phonology on segments and distribution.Terminologically, ‘structure’ may label the linear pattern, and ‘system’, the non-linearpattern. Phonological features are the focus of those more concerned with system. The firstreal (home grown) intrusion of (simultaneous) phonological features is Hockett’s (1947)“Componential analysis of Sierra Popoluca”. Concern with distribution results in ‘longcomponents’ (Harris 1944). Only with Jakobson, Fant & Halle’s 1951 Preliminaries toSpeech Analysis do features start to become the way to do phonology in North America.


Assumption 7. The number of orders of phonemes in the morphemes andwords of a language is a sub-multiple of the number of possible orders ...

20. Def. The orders which occur are the sound-patterns of the language ...

21. Def. Different forms which are alike as to phonemes are homonymous.

This series takes the morpheme as its domain, and then projects a second —and different — segmentation upon the same vocal features that have beenorganized into forms.8 Cf. Figure 2. Phonological organization presup-poses the morpheme segmentation, for it works within the segmentations pro-

l

The grand son s climb ed down

g r æ n n n

es k a y m dd a wz

Figure 2: The second organization of an utterance in terms of phonemes.

vided by Figure 1. But it operates independently on the identified domains ofvocal features and does not presuppose any fixed relationship between theunits of the grammatical pattern, i.e., morphemes, and the units of thephonemic pattern, i.e., phonemes. Any relation between the two organizationsof form and phomeme is indirect and mediated through the vocal features,which are simultaneously, but independently formed by each. One does not

8 By Def. 9, morpheme is equivalent to (a kind of) form ; and by Def. 6, form is reduced tovocal features. Therefore, phonemes organize a range of predelimited (morpheme ‘size’)vocal features, but require nothing in addition to that.

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work ‘though’ grammar to reach phonemics, nor does one work throughphonemics to reach grammar. There is, therefore, no necessary hierarchicalconnection between the two patterns. Each is an autonomous projection ofpattern upon the same vocal features. When Bloomfield (1926:157) writes:

The morphemes of a language can thus be analyzed into a small number of

meaningless phonemes. The sememes on the other hand, which stand in one-to-one

correspondence with the morphemes, cannot be further analyzed by linguistic

methods.9

it is not necessary to assume that the relation is

Sememes|

Morphemes|

Phonemes

Figure 3: A hierarchical relation among the organizations of an utterance.

Morphemes are projections of content, i.e., sememes, upon the vocal features;and phonemes are a second, parallel projection upon the same vocal features.But nothing which Bloomfield writes requires that morphemes ‘pass through’phonemes on their way to the data, the utterances.

If there is a one-to-one correlation of meaning (i.e., sememes) to forms(i.e., morphemes), then the top half of Figure 2 (above the continuum of vocalfeatures) is simultaneously a projection of content (Saussure’s signifieds)upon vocal features, and the bottom half of Figure 2 is a projection of theshape of expression (Saussure’s signifiers) upon that same stream of vocalfeatures. The congruent intersection of the two projections now stands as theBloomfieldian equivalent of the Saussurean sign. The isomorphism betweencontent/sememes and form/morphemes compels us not to distinguish agrammar from a semantics, for the one is the other. To describe the grammarof minimum and non-minimum forms is to describe simultaneously the

9 If the sememes could be further analyzed, the units of that analysis would parallel (in thedomain of ‘stimulus-reaction features’) the simultaneous components of Hockett’s (1947)‘componential analysis’ (in the domain of ‘vocal features’). Although Bloomfield’s positionrecognizes the associative relation that Saussure saw between enseignment, clément,justement, etc., there is nothing which recalls the associative relation suggested byenseignment, apprentissage, éducation, etc.


semantics of language. And at this point there seem to be only two kinds ofpattern within language. Only when the techniques for establishing the unitsare worked out more explicitly will the patterns be hierarchicalized as inFigure 3.

2.3The presence of order in language.Bloomfield goes on to recognize a pattern analogous to Saussure’s

associative pattern, but this pattern is founded on sequence rather than theparadigmatic associative pattern of forms (or signs as in Saussure)(Bloomfield 1926:157-60):

22. Assumption 8. Different non-minimum forms may be alike or partly alikeas to the order of the constituent forms and as to stimulus-reaction featurescorresponding to this order.

23. Def. Such recurrent sames of order are constructions; the correspondingstimulus-reaction features are constructional meanings ...

24. Def. The construction of formatives in a word is a morphologicconstruction ...

25. Def. The construction of free forms (and phrase formatives) in a phrase isa syntactic construction ...

26. Def. A maximum X is an X which is not part of a larger X ...27. Def. A maximum construction in any utterance is a sentence ...28. Assumption 9. The number of constructions in a language is a small sub-

multiple of the number of forms ...29. Def. Each of the ordered units in a construction is a position ...31. Def. The meaning of a position is a functional meaning ...32. Def. The positions in which a form occurs are its functions ...33. Def. All forms having the same functions constitute a form-class ...34. Def. The functional meanings in which the forms of a form class appear

constitute the class-meaning ...35. Def. The functional meanings and class-meanings of a language are the

categories of the language ...36. Def. If a form-class contains relatively few forms, the meanings of these

forms may be called sub-categories ...37. Def. A form-class of words is a word-class ...38. Def. The maximum word-classes of a language are the parts of speech of

that language ...

Note first that Bloomfield begins with “the order of the constituent forms”.For Saussure, it is the presence of associative patterns (recognized by therepetition of signs) which places the syntagmatic presence into relief. But hereit is partial sames of order (not of forms, but of position. Cf. Def 29.)corresponding isomorphically to sames of stimulus-reaction which is the basis

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for this pattern ... just the reverse of Saussure. This alternative emphasis uponthe syntagmatic at the expense of the paradigmatic is characteristic ofAmerican structuralism. But given the prior emphasis on the r ··· s portion ofthe speech act (as well as the common experience with analyzing spoken —sequentially represented — samples of unfamiliar languages), this bias is notsurprising. Throughout, each formal construct maintains its one-to-onerelation with meaning:

Form Meaning

construction constructional meaningposition functional meaning

form-class class-meaning

If we are able to describe the morphemes, constructions, positions, and form-classes, we have automatically described the semantics of language. Grammarand semantics are not distinct. They constitute different aspects of onepatterning, that of constructions.

3. Conclusion and an alternative organizationThe theory of language that is described in Bloomfield’s postulates posits

three distinct kinds of pattern in language: that of forms, that of phonemes,and that of positions. Each of these three patterns supplies its distinctorganization to the stream of vocal features. Although the patterns ofphonemes depends upon the prior segmentation of the continuum of vocalfeatures into morpheme-sized chunks, phonemic organization does not work‘through’ morphemes. And the organization of positions into constructions,depends upon the assumption that “non-minimum forms may be alike orpartly alike as to order of the constituent forms”, but constructions are notorders of forms. They are not another aspect of the previous patterning offorms. Patterns of forms were recognized by the corresponding sememes. Thisis a pattern of positions recognized by their own functional meaning.Assumption 8 directs us to perceive this pattern via forms (in the wayphonemes were recognized via forms), but it is a separate and independentorganization of the stream of vocal features. Figure 4 attempts to depict therelation of forms, phonemes, and positions to each other and to vocal features.


Forms Positions

Phonemes

Figure 4: The Relations of Form, Position, and Phoneme to Each Other and to Vocal features.

The series of definitions from 23 - 38 suggest a grammar of the familiarsort with hierarchy: i.e., ordered positions filled by forms which are in turnconstructions composed of ordered positions, etc. But that is not a necessaryinterpretation of Bloomfield’s construction(s), and it is not one that isconfirmed by Bloomfield’s Language (1933), in which he presents a slightlydifferent view of this aspect of language, one which centers about the notionof taxeme, “a simple feature of grammatical arrangement” (Bloomfield1933:166). Bloomfield (1933:163f.) identifies four taxemes:

(i) Order. This is the same “order” of Assumption 8. It consists of “thesuccession in which the constituents of a complex form are spoken”(Bloomfield 1933:163).

(ii) Modulation. Modulation consists of the use of “secondary phonemes ...of pitch ... of stress” (Bloomfield 1933:163) to alter the sense of anutterance: 2You’ve got a 3headache3|| versus 2You’ve got a 3headache1#

(iii) Phonetic modulation. It is recognized as “a change in the primaryphonemes of a form” (Bloomfield 1933:163). Compare:

(a) Who do you want to drive? /wánt /(b) Who do you wanna drive? /wán /

(iv) Selection. “The meaning of a complex form depends in part upon theselection of the constituent forms ... the features of selection are usuallyquite complicated with form-classes divided into sub-classes”(Bloomfield 1933:165)

Each of these taxemes by itself is a grammatical feature (cp. vocal feature)which has no meaning. But the taxemes may act together in meaning

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combinations (minimal or not) to create a tactic form , which when combinedwith its meaning, is a grammatical form.10 Now the “smallest meaningfulunits of grammatical form may be spoken of as tagmemes, and their meaningsas episememes” (Bloomfield 1933:166). Compare, for example, SV versus SVin English:

(1) (a) Oh, am I lonely!(b) ?Oh, I am lonely!

(2) (a) Why was the thief cáught?(b) Why the thief was cáught ...

(3) (a) The thief had gotten caught.(b) Had the thief gotten caught ...

(4) (a) I shall never do that again.(b) Never shall I do that again.(c) ?Never I shall do that again.

The taxeme of selection (of the noun form-class and the verb form-class) plusthe taxeme of order combines to effect the contrasting tagmemes of SV andVS. SV will have one episememe which contrasts with the episememe of VS.Finally (Bloomfield 1933:184):

The free forms (words and phrases) of a language appear in larger free forms

(phrases), arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic modification, selection, and

order. Any meaningful recurrent of such taxemes is a syntactic construction.

Such a conception of syntax (or more broadly grammar) allows us tounderstand its patterns without requiring the notion of hierarchy. Such a flatview of language is not, however, the one which comes to dominate thesyntax of American Structuralism.11

10 A tactic form will always be a grammatical form, for it is the presence of meaning whichdelimits the taxemes as a tactic form. Without meaning, taxemes are like vocal featureswithout accompanying stimulus-response reactions. Neither is an utterance.

11 The issue re-emerges within Transformational Generative Grammar in terms of whether ornot there exist languages which have transformational rules which do not refer tohierarchical structure (i.e., trees or portions of trees). The fact that some languages do appearto have rules which make reference to hierarchy is a strong justification for TGG as it stands;



but if languages (some or all) do not work in this way, then TGG is weakened. The issue hereis expressed in terms of configurational languages and nonconfigurational ones. Hale(1976) suggests that Warlpiri (Walbiri) may be a nonconfigurational language

Chapter 8

American Strucutralism:Psychological Reality

1. IntroductionBloomfield (1926:157) characterizes a phoneme as “a minimum same of

vocal feature”, and in his 1933 book, Language, he illustrates with thedescription of phonemes for English while referring to “a moderate amount ofexperimenting” (Bloomfield 1933:78), which will “reveal” (79) “replaceableparts in the word” (79). And then when the phonemes in one part of the wordare determined by this replacement, “a little practice will enable the observerto recognize a phoneme even when it appears in different parts of words”(Bloomfield 1933:79). Such a statement may suffice when working with one’sown language, but one’s intuitions (or “a little practice”) will not be adequateto discover the phonemes of a language such as Chitimacha (a now extinctmember of the Gulf languages, which included Tunica, Natchez, and Atakapa;formerly spoken in southwestern Louisiana). A more explicit statement ofhow ... practically ... to proceed will be necessary (Swadesh 1934:117):

In studying the phonemes of Chitimacha (an Indian language of Louisiana), Iknew of no single source from which I could learn to understand all thephenomena I observed. There seemed to be a need for an adequate and completeexposition of the phonemic principle including, especially, an account of how itapplies to the more marginal and difficult types of phenomena.

As we now expect, the initial impulse to make phonology more explicit is thepractical one of language description ... description of an American Indianlanguage. The techniques then turn back upon the theory to reshape it in lightof the application. The direction of influence, from description to theory, isclear in Sapir’s (1933/1951:23) remarks:

In the course of many years of experience in the recording and analysis ofunwritten languages, American Indian and African, I have come to the practicalrealization that what the native speaker hears is not phonetic elements but

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phonemes.

2. The Character of the PhonemeTo begin with, how is the notion of phoneme to be conceived? It is a

minimum same of vocal feature, but is it truly possible for the phoneme be aconstant, exact replication of a sound (vocal feature) from one occasion to thenext? If a phoneme is recognized as objectively different from utterance toutterance, yet somehow still the same, is the objective difference beingattributed to interference of some sort? Is it an articulatory (motor/muscular)sameness? Bloomfield (1933:80):

The phonemes of a language are not sounds but merely features of sounds [emph.mine, PWD] which the speakers have been trained to produce and recognize in thecurrent of actual speech-sound — just as motorists are trained to stop before a redsignal, be it an electric signal-light, a lamp, a flag, or what not, although there isno disembodied redness apart from these actual sounds.

This treats phonemes as phonetic stuff. A portion of the noise a speakermakes can be recognized ... apparently ... as constant. In the same way that“each linguistic form has a constant and specific meaning” (Bloomfield 1933:145), a phoneme will have (a) constant feature(s) of sound and be recognizedby that diagnostic presence.

Swadesh (1934:118) emphasizes another aspect of the phoneme:

The phonemes of a language are, in a sense, percepts to the native speakers of thegiven language. If they hear a foreign tongue spoken, they still tend to hear interms of their native phonemes ... If the phonemes are percepts to the nativespeakers of the language, they are not necessarily percepts that he experiences inisolation. They occur ordinarily as the elements of words or sentences. Phonemesare perceptive units [Emphases mine, PWD] in the sense that the native canrecognize as different, words different as to one of the component phonemes, e.g.bid and hid or bid and bed or bid and bit. The phoneme is the smallest potentialunit of difference between similar words recognizable as different to the native.

There are two points on which Swadesh, Sapir, and some others differ withBloomfield. First , a ‘percept’ or ‘perceptive unit’ is not ‘feature(s) of sound’.And second, it will make a difference whether we choose to restrict the abilityto hear a difference to the domain of morphemes, as Bloomfield (1926:157)appears to do with his Assumption 4 followed by Def. 16. In practice,Bloomfield (1933, 1935) operates with words, minimum free forms.1 Swadesh

1 In describing the Central Western dialect of American English (Chicago), Bloomfield

PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY 3

allows the domain within which that sameness is perceived to be much larger.The issue is context, how much and whether it is relevant to the recognitionthat “morphemes may be alike or partly alike as to vocal features”(Bloomfield 1926.127).

Swadesh’s teacher, Edward Sapir, exemplifies both of these alternatives:phonemes are ‘percepts’ and the domain for the application of these perceptsis larger than the word. Note this statement concerning the difference betweenphonetics and the phoneme (Sapir 1933/1951:22):

... no entity in human experience can be adequately defined as the mechanical sumor product of its physical properties.2

3. Phonology at Work The principle of complementarity is illustrated in these data from S. Paiute(Sapir 1933/1951:25):3

(1) [ '] /papa·/(2) [ A] /papa/(3) [páp·'A] /pap·a/(4) [pApá'] /pap·a·/

In Sapir’s analysis, there are two contrasting phonemes /p/ and /p·/ with thesevariants:

/p/ [p ]/p·/ [p· p]

Only /p/ occurs initially, and both /p/ and /p/ occur in V –– V. For /p·/, [p·]appears after a voiced vowel (and it is also aspirated before an unvoiced

(1935:98) claims that “The existence of these phonemes is established by 136 such pairs aspit : pet, look : luck, cam : calm, bomb : balm, see : say”. They are all words andsimultaneously, morphemes.

2 Sapir (1933/1951:22) continues: “These physical properties are needed of course to give usthe signal, as it were, for the identification of the given entity as a functionally significantpoint in a complex system of relatednesses; but how many of these physical properties are, ormay be, overlooked as irrelevant, how one particular property, possessing for the moment orby social understanding an unusual sign value, may have a determinedness in the definitionof the entity that is all out of proportion to its ‘physical weight’”.

3 Sapir transcribes a voiceless [a] as [A].

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vowel as in [3]); and [p] appears after an unvoiced vowel (i.e., [A] in [4]). For/p/, [p] appears initially; and [] and [ ] medially, with the latter beforevoiceless vowels, the former before voiced. A form such as [] ‘at thewater’, when taught to a native speaker “of average intelligence” was rendered... unguided by Sapir ... as “ ” (Sapir 1933/1951:24):

Tony was not ‘hearing’ in terms of actual sounds (the voiced bilabial wasobjectively very different from the initial stop) but in terms of an etymologicalreconstruction: pa·- ‘water’ plus postposition *-pa' ‘at’ ... a theoretically real butactually non-existent form ... *pa' does not actually exist as an independentelement but must always be actualized in one of three possible postvocalic forms.

Sapir (1933/1951:25-27) describes Sarcee (Athabaskan) data as follows:

(5) [dìní'] ‘this one’ /dìní/(6) [dìní'] ‘it makes a sound’ /dìnít'/(7) [dìná· ] ‘he who is this one’ /dìnái/(8) [dìníla] ‘it turns out that he is /dìníla/

this one’(9) [dìnít'í] ‘he who makes a sound’ /dìnít'i/(10) [dìní a] ‘it turns out that it /dìnít'la/

makes a sound’

With regard to the apparent ‘homonyms’ of (5) and (6), Sapir (1933/51:26)notes:

In the early stage of our work I asked my interpreter, John Whitney, whether thetwo words sounded alike to him and he answered without hesitation that they werequite different ... When I asked him what the difference was, he found it difficultto say, and the more often he pronounced the words over to himself the moreconfused he became as to their phonetic difference. Yet all the time he seemperfectly sure that there was a difference .... The one tangible suggestion that hehimself made was obviously incorrect, namely, that the -ní of ‘it makes a sound’ended with a ‘t’. John claimed that he “felt a t” in the syllable, yet when he testedit over and over to himself, he had to admit that he could neither hear a ‘t’ nor feelhis tongue articulating one.

Discovery of the additional forms of (7) - (10) show that there is a basis forthe speaker’s perception of a difference.

Nootka (Sapir 1933/1951) has these data:


(11) [his·ik] ‘?’ /hisik/(12) [ ] ‘?’ / isa·/(13) [kwis·i a] ‘to do differently’ /kwis-si a/(14) [t as·at ] ‘the stick takes an /t a-sat /

upright position on thebeach’

(15) [ ] ‘we went there only to /speak’ -go.in.order.to-just-

A pattern of “lengthening of consonants after a short vowel when followed bya vowel” (Sapir 1933/51:27) accounts for the [s·] for /s/ in (11) and (12). Thecurious thing is that a speaker of Nootka with whom Sapir worked “[wrote]tsi·q it 'assat ni ‘we went there only to speak’” with ss and not s as (11) and(12) (Sapir 1933/1951:27-28):

In such cases the long consonant is not felt to be a mechanical lengthening of thesimple consonant but as a cluster of two identical consonants ... Here again wehave objectively identical phonetic phenomena which receive different phono-logic interpretation [Emphases mine, PWD].

Trager (1934) offers a phonemic interpretation of Russian vowels whichalso reflects the same kind of concern that Sapir and Swadesh have. Considerthese phonetic data:

(16) [ ] ‘to drink’ / /(17) [ é ] ‘to sing’ / /(18) [ ] ‘five’ / /(19) [ úst/(20) [g I I

The stressed vowels of this variety of Russian are:

/i/ [i ] /u/ [u ü]

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/e/ [e ] /o/ [o ö]/a/ [a ä]

The pretonic vowel system has a four-way contrast, and the atonic system hasthree distinctive vowels:

Pretonic Vowels Atonic Vowels

/i u /i ue a/ a/

The pretonic vowels are assigned as allophones to one of the above phonemicvowels as indicated by the transcriptions below:

[ dá] ‘misfortune’ / edá/[ t] ‘misfortune [gen.pl.]’ / ed/

[ ] ‘misfortune [gen.pl.]’ / e dé/

The vowel [] in (32) is analyzed in the same way as the [] in (30) anddifferent from the vowel [a] in (31). Even though (31) and (32) contain thesame morpheme, “this [] [of (32)] cannot be distinguished from the other [of(30)]”.

According to the principles of ‘structural’ transcription, we have to write [bjedj'e]and [zjvjezjdj'e]. We cannot write [bjidj'e], etc. since the symbol [i] [i.e., thephoneme /i/] in pretonic position indicates the sound [i] [i.e., the allophone [i]],while here we have the sound [I ] [i.e., the allophone [I]]. We conclude that inpretonic position [I ] is part of the [e] phoneme, and is phonemically(‘structurally’) different from the [I ] of unstressed syllables considered above [“wewrite ... blue (nom. sg. masc) ... [sj'inji] and pronounce [sj'inj I]”] as part of the [i]phoneme.4

Trager (1934:337-38) concludes:

4 Note that phonemic notation is surrounded by [square brackets] in the same way that[phonetic notation] is. Only with Hockett (1942) are /solidi/ conventionally used foridentifying phonemic transcriptions.


In atonic position, orthographic e is always [I ], except when final after [j]preceded by a vowel, where we have []. We can analyze this situation only in thefollowing manner: final after [j], the etymologically expected phoneme [e] isreplaced by the phoneme [a] (which, being unstressed, here appears with thesound [ ]). In other atonic positions, the expected [e] is replaced by the regularunstressed form of the phoneme [i]. Here there is no way to distinguish between[the phoneme] [i] and [the phoneme] [e] because the sound [I ] [i.e., the phoneme/i/] represents both of them in the same structural situations, whereas in pretonicposition, the sound [I] [i.e, the allophone [I ]] can only come from [the phoneme][e]. The phoneme [e], then appears only in stressed and pretonic positions, while[the phoneme] [i] alone can appear in unstressed [i.e., atonic] position. Thepsychological validity of the two analyses just made is proved by the spelling ofuntutored speakers of Russian; in atonic position we find constant confusionbetween the letters i and e, but in pretonic position they are kept distinct[Emphases mine, PWD. Trager quotes Sapir 1933 for support here].5

A similar problem holds for the consonants:

(33) [gór t] ‘city’ / /(34) [g r dá] ‘cities’ /garadá/(35) [ráp] ‘slave’ /ráb/(36) [r bá] ‘slave [gen.sg.]’ /rabá/(37) [drúk] ‘friend’ /drúg/(38) [drúg ] ‘friend [gen. sg.]’ /drúga/(39) [páp] ‘priest’ /páp/(40) [p pá] ‘priest [gen.sg.]’ /papá/(41) [gró ] ‘farthing’ /gró /(42) [pót] ‘sweat [n.] /pót/(43) [p tú] ‘sweat [loc.sg.]’ /patú/(44) [lúk] ‘onion’ /lúk/(45) [lúk ] ‘onion [gen.sg.]’ /lúka/(46) [ ] ‘herring’ / a/(47) [útk ] ‘duck’ /útka/(48) [ I ] ‘herring [gen.pl.]’ / /(49) [út k] ‘ducks [gen.pl]’ /útak/(50) [ ] ‘herring [nondim.]’ / /(51) [ ] ‘herring [nondim.gen.sg.]’/ a/

5 “Examples of atonic e are materi, gen. of matj mother, [m'atjirj i]; budjte, imperative pl. be,[b'utjtji]; velikan giant [vj il jik'an], where the first [i] is pronounced [I], according to theregular rules for atonic and pretonic [i] phoneme; etc.” (Trager 1935:338).

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(52) [rastóf] ‘Rostov’ /rastóv/(53) [ ] ‘Rostov [loc.]’ /rastó i/(54) [r stófsk y] ‘Rostov [adj.]’ /rastófskay/(55) [g r tskóy] ‘city [adj.]’ /garatskóy/(56) [rápsk y] ‘slave [adj.]’ /rápskay/

The rule for voiced stops and spirants is this, then: the etymological voiced sounds... retain their psychological identity and distinction from the correspondingvoiceless sounds in final position or before a voiceless sound in all words inwhich at least one inflectional form retains the original sound, even though theyare, objectively, completely voiceless in the positions indicated; but inderivations under the same conditions, where the original voiced sound does notreappear in any inflected form, we have complete psychological identification[Emphases mine, PWD] of the original voiced sound with the new, voicelesssound, and their merging into the voiceless phoneme, despite the presence of thevoiced sound in the original of the derivative, or in some other derivative. (Trager1934:341-42)

4. Practice and TheorySwadesh (1934:123) expresses the relationship between technique and

theory in this way:

The phonemes of a language can be discovered only by inductive procedure. Thisgoing from particular instances to general conception is as characteristic of theunconscious process of a native acquiring his language as it must be of consciousscientific study [Emphasis mine, PWD].

A methodology is evolving, and it is assumed that the psychology of thespeaker will mirror the method. The form of phonology is isomorphic with thepsychology in the same way that form of grammar is assumed to beisomorphic with the stimulus-reactions of psychology, anthropology, etc. Thetheory is one which claims to have a degree of realism; but it makes a furtherstrong claim that the psychology it imputes is to be equivalent to theemerging techniques. But this is already an intrusion of the linguist beyondthe realm suggested by Bloomfield (1933:32):

... the linguist deals only with the speech-signal (r ··· s); he is not competent[emph. mine, PWD] to deal with problems of physiology or psychology.

Swadesh (1934:340) has remarked:

... the paradigm exists in the mind of the speaker as a psychological reality ...


The dangers of equating methodology with psychological reality isillustrated with this set of data from Maori:6

ACTIVE VERBS PASSIVE VERBS

(57) awhi awhitia ‘embrace’(58) hopu hopukia ‘catch’(59) aru arumia ‘follow’(60) tohu tohu ia ‘point out’(61) mau mauria ‘carry’(62) wero werohia ‘stab’(63) patu patua ‘strike’(64) kite kitea ‘see/find’

Conventional descriptions of these data, accepting the relevance of the‘paradigm’, will recognize that some roots are consonant final and some arenot:

Consonant Final Vowel Final

awhit patu hopuk kite arum tohu maur weroh

The regularity in (57) - (64) is that there appears to be no consonant finalwords in the language. That is, a speaker of Maori knows:

C –––> Ø/ ––#

And additionally:

V –––> Ø/ V –– VBut there is a causative marker in Maori, whaka, which when added to verbs

6 The following forms are taken from Kiparsky (1971:591-93).

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requires the additional presence of what appears to be the passive marker (toindicate the causee). And when this appears, we find a pattern distinct from(57) - (64):

(65) (a) mau whakamautia ‘make carry’(b) *whakamauria

(66) (a) patu whakapatutia ‘make strike'(b) *whakapatua

Generalized throughout, the shape tia appears in the causative. The tia shapealso is used in making passives of borrowed words, and in compounds, andwhen nouns are used as verbs, and finally in forgotten words. They all exploitthe shape tia. This suggests that the pattern in (57) - (64) is misleading andthat the two regularities which drop consonants finally and vowelsintervocally are mistaken. Rather than the neatness they express, there is apattern in which some verbs take tia, others take kia, still others mia, ria,hia, etc. And some use a. Our techniques guide us to the simplest, mostregular solution; but the behavior (and psychology) of the speakers indicatesthis is mistaken and that the less simple solution in which the matching oraffixes with roots is effected by grammatical/lexical information (on anidiosyncratic morpheme by morpheme basis) and not by phonological shape.

5. ConclusionSeveral issues emerge from the analysis of these examples. The over

arching concern is how one discovers the presence of phonemic identity orrecurrence. Given the initial encounter with an unknown language, the firstimpression is one of almost endless phonetic variation. Little seems to recur,and the first demand is to find repetition. There must be some pattern in thischaos, and it will be discovered by recognizing samenesses in spite of theobjective differences. How that is accomplished produces distinct notions ofwhat phonemes are like and of the character of language.

First , is the constancy of phonemes to be lodged in objective, physicalnoise (articulation)? If so, how do we (or can we) discover some physicalsameness where we have decided a sameness of phonemes exists? If it is notpossible to discover a constant physical same for a phoneme in each of itsoccurrences, where then does that ‘same’ reside?7 Contra Bloomfield,

7 Bloomfield wanted to maintain the phoneme as a physical concept while Sapir, Swadesh,and Trager proposed the phoneme as non-physical, a “percept”.


language must be something other than vocal features. Second, how do weproject the phonemic sameness? If ‘same’ is not a given (and it is not, or wewould not be confronting this as a problem in the first place), how is itcreated? Practically, we are introduced to Chitimacha or S. Paiute facing itsvariation, and to achieve same, we must somehow neutralize the variety. Thisis interpreted to mean that we should find ways to predict the variation. If wecan, the we have discovered a sameness uniting the variety, a pattern. Theobvious place to look is the environment. I.e., if the occurrence of X1correlates with what is adjacent to X1, and if the occurrence of X2 correlateswith what is adjacent to X2, and if the two correlates are different, then wemay think that there is a single same X, which is observed to be in fact eitherX1 or X2 dependent upon what occurs adjacent to X. But this tact raisesadditional questions. How are we to interpret “environment”? Is X1 or X2predicted by looking at the objective phonetic environment alone? Or is itrelevant to examine non-phonetic environment?8 If we examine phoneticenvironment for conditioning context, how much of it (adjacent, close, ordistant) is permitted to effect variants in phonemes? Morpheme, word, orphrase? Responses to some of these issues are discussed in the followingchapter.

[Version: October 4, 2005]

8 Bloomfield confined the environment to morphemes, or words equivalent to morphemes,and allowed the simple recognition of same or different morpheme to decide the question.Sapir allowed the environment to be broader, e.g. the morpheme X in all its occurrences, notjust the occurrence we happen to be considering at the moment. Thus, John Whitney couldponder [dìní'] as meaning ‘It makes a sound’ and perceive a [t] because this techniquemakes [dìnít'í] part of the relevant ‘environment’ along with [dìní']. Bloomfield confined theprocess to difference in meaning among utterances, and Sapir extended the process to allowwhat the utterances meant, not just that they were different.

Chapter 9

American Structuralism:Responses to Psychological Reality

“The term phoneme has been used

by a few linguists to refer to what

I

should call the psychological

correlate of the phoneme, but this

type of definition has been losing

ground ...” (Swadesh 1935:248)

1. IntroductionPatterns which are manifest in phonetic variety are attributed to several

distinct portions of language. We recognize these now by the names:morphophonemics, phonemics/phonology, and phonetics. Morpho-phono-logy was first thought to include (Swadesh 1934:128)

... in addition the study of phonemic structure of morphemes, the study ofinterchange between phonemes as a morphologic [Emphasis mine, PWD]process.

There is a second interchange between phonemes which is not morpho-phonological; they constitute word variants (Swadesh 1934:118-119).Swadesh provides a taxonomy of such variants: free variants and conditionalvariants (“determined by position in the sentence”).1 The latter may beparticular (e.g. English a ~ an) or general; and the general kind may bephonetically or structurally conditioned (Swadesh 1934:119):

Structurally conditioned, e.g. Tunica disyllabic words of the form CVV have thatform only when spoken in isolation; in context they become CV as: rii ‘house’,context form ri.

1 Free variants include variation of the familiar sort, e.g. economics / / and/ /.

Swadesh (1934:123) provides the following as statement as the first of his‘methods’ for inductively discovering the phonemes of a language:

1. The criterion of consistency of words. Except for word variants [such as theTunica example, PWD] different occurrences of the same word have thesame phonemes.

By this characterization, Tunica [ ] and [ri] represent two distinct phonemicsequences. In contrast to the Tunica example, different occurrences of thesame word will have the same phonemes, e.g. Russian [ ] ‘seven’ and[ ] ‘seven [gen.]’ where the variants ‘seven’, [] and [ ], areconditioned by the position of stress, and also [drúk] ‘friend’ and [drúga]‘friend [gen.sg.]’, where the variation [drúk] ~ [drúg] is conditioned by theabsence of a following vowel.

Where the conditioning contexts of sound shapes of the morphemes aregrammatical and within the word, the variation is within morphopho-nology. The alternation of /f/ with /v/ in the plural shape of /liyf/ leafidentifies this /f/ as distinct from the /f/ in / / cuff, which does not vary inthis way (Swadesh 1934:129):

Whether it is a convenient fiction or a true reflection of linguistic psychology,morphological processes are usually described as having a definite order. Leavesis taken to be a secondary formation from leaf, and in consequence v is themutation of f and not f of v. But f does not always change to v in themorphological process of plural formation; thus, we have cuff, cuffs. The f of cuffis therefore morphologically different [Emphasis mine, PWD] from the f of leaf,though phonemically it is the same entity. Morphologically, we have two f’s sothat f1 : v :: f2 :f. Morphologically distinct phonemes are called morpho-phonemes.2

2 With the introduction of “morphophonology” into the terminology, there is already someindecision as to where it should apply. Cf. Figure 1. Swadesh (1934) follows Prague schoolusage in using it to label such variation as /liyf/ ~ /liyv/, but he (1935:249) also classifies theSarcee example of [dìní'] /dìní/ ‘this one’ and [dìní'] /dìnít/ ‘it makes a sound’ as an instanceof morphophonemics, writing that it “seems actually to demonstrate a morpho-phonologicalrather than a phonemic difference”. It is not morphophonological by Swadesh’s (1934)characterization of morphophonology. If the example is not one of phonemics, it wouldappear to parallel Swadesh’s Tunica example, so that [dìní'] ‘it makes a sound’ and [dìnít'i]‘he who makes a sound’ constitute word variants. That is, in place of the representation being/dìnít'/ and /dinít'i/, it is /dìní/ and /dinít'i/. The only difference between this example and onesuch as the Russian /rab/ ‘slave’ is that one of the allophones of Sarcee /t'/ would be [ ] ...silence.

RESPONSES TO PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY 3

We have with these four examples (Russian [ ], Russian [drúk]‘friend’ and [drúga] ‘friend’, Tunica [rii] ~ [ri], and English /liyf/ ~ /liyv/)four instances of variation and four instances of pattern. For Swadesh, certainof that variation will be ‘sub-phonemic’. That is, the variation will becontained within phonology and described by the method of complementarydistribution (Swadesh 1934:123):

4. The criterion of complementary distribution. If it is true of two similar typesof sounds that only one of them normally occurs in certain phoneticsurroundings and that only the other normally occurs in certain other phoneticsurroundings, the two may be sub-types of the same phoneme.

The Russian ‘seven’ example and the Russian ‘city’ example fall into thiscategory. The Tunica ‘house’ and the English leaf/leaves examples exhibitphonological distinctness, but the second also falls into the class of morpho-phonology.3

Figure 1 summarizes that array of variation and the interpretation of it. Itis the adjustment of the boundaries within Figure 1 which become the subjectof debate. Where is the boundary of pattern attributable to allophonics orphonemics? Where is the boundary between phonemics (same representationsof words or morphemes) and morphophonology (different representations ofwords or morphemes)? The issues which figure in that debate are theinvocation of psychological (‘mentalistic’) data/criteria and the impositionof purified technique upon the theory.

Phonemic Word Variants

VARIETY TYPE OF PATTERN

English [f] and [v] Morphophonology

Phonology

Phonology

Tunica

Russian

Russian

[ i] and Ø

[d] and [t]

[é] and [ ]

Figure 1: The boundaries between types of pattern.

3 The Maori example of awhi ‘embrace [active]’ ~ awhitia ‘embrace [passive]’, although itinvolves an alternation of [t] with Ø as the Tunica involves an alternation of [i] with Ø,would be considered differently. The Maori difference would be a phonological samenesson the order of the Russian [d] ~ [t] in ‘city’ because the conditioning environment is not“position in the sentence” (Swadesh 1934:119), but its phonetic position in the word, i.e., thepresence of following morphological (bound) material and not word (free) material.

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2. Some Responses to Psychological Approaches to the PhonemeAt the same time that Sapir, Swadesh, and Trager are describing languages

with an appeal to perceptual units and invoking psychological reality, othersare labeling those approaches as invalid. Twaddell’s (1935a) reluctance toaccept a psychological interpretation of the phoneme lies in his belief thatthey “fail to meet the requirements of methodological feasibility” (Twaddell1935a:9). The same concerns — techniques — which prompted Swadesh tothe statement of the phonemic principle compel Twaddell as well to commenton the problem; but rather than coming to the problem from the starting pointof language description, Twaddell (1935a:18) addresses the issue in terms ofthe problem noted earlier in Bloomfield’s Assumption 1, namely, that“Within certain communities successive utterances are alike or partly alike”:

... physical events [of the relevant sort] are the material of linguistic study,however, and accordingly the first step in linguistic study must be the establishingof criteria for determining which of the innumerable physical differences are alsosignificant linguistic differences. Until those criteria have been established, theuse of the terms ‘linguistically same’ and ‘linguistically different’ is unjustified.

Twaddell is more purely theoretical and comments (Twaddell 1935a:9)critically upon Sapir’s (and others’) psychologizing:

Such a [‘mental’] definition is invalid because (1) we have no right to guess aboutthe linguistic workings of an inaccessible ‘mind’, and (2) we can secure noadvantage from such guesses.

The issue here can be examined from two perspectives:

(i) whether a speaker hears objectively distinct sounds as same ordifferent,

(ii) whether a speaker hears objectively same sounds as same ordifferent.

Sapir’s speaker of S. Paiute exemplifies the first sort (i.e., [p] and []), and hisspeakers of Sarcee and Nootka exemplify that of the second sort (i.e., Sarcee[i'] as i or it ' and Nootka [s·] as s or as ss).4 In the first case involving S. Paiute[p] and [ ], Twaddell (1935a:11) is troubled because “Sapir is obliged topresent negative evidence”; that is, the speaker fails to distinguish the two.

4 Of course, ‘distinct as same’ and ‘same as distinct’ are the interesting cases and the onesfocussed on.


What Twaddell (1935a:12) would prefer is positive evidence of the identityof [p] and [ ]:

If Sapir’s Paiute guide had been trained to record one variety of labial consonantas [p]; if he had been requested to pronounce all other varieties of ‘the samesound’; if he had then without hesitation and without duplication responded withexamples of all these other varieties –– we might then concede that he appeared tohave some mental concept of a unified [p]-phoneme which was variouslyactualized in his speech.

But the ‘sameness’ requires precisely that a speaker cannot accomplish thetask Twaddell describes; that is what a ‘perceptual unit’ means.5 It is a unit(unity). Twaddell’s reservations concerning the examples of (ii) — Sarcee andNootka — refer to the information which the speaker exploits for his responseof same-as-different (Twaddell 1935a:13):

In so far as this incident [the Sarcee speaker’s assuring Sapir that “dìní ‘celui-ci’and dìní ‘cela fait du bruit’ ... ‘étaient totalement differents’”] may be interpretedas evidence of any mental reality, it would appear to be a morphological class orlexical [Emphasis mine, PWD] unit than any phonetic or quasi-phonetic class orunit.

The Nootka example is similarly discounted (Twaddell 1935a:13):

Similarly, Alex Thomas’s transcription of his native Nootka distinguishedbetween long consonants as positional variants of short consonants and as theproduct of combination of similar final and initial consonants of separate lexicalelements. This practice, too, appears more appropriately referred to lexical[Emphasis mine, PWD] than to quasi-phonetic consciousness, in terms of mentalreality.

And in summary (Twaddell 1935a:14):

In short, until positive and unambiguous evidence of the mental reality ofphonemes can be adduced, it appears methodologically dangerous to define thephoneme in terms of mental reality.

Notice that there is no evidence to contradict Sapir’s data. It is a matter of

5 The proposed test is one that could only be seriously entertained by someone who has neverengaged in ‘field linguistics’. Twaddell was trained in German and in linguistics (Ph.D. 1930from Harvard). He seems never to have encountered a non-Indo-European language in a fieldsituation (Hill 1983).

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whether those data in themselves suffice. Sapir is not wrong; he is not rightenough.

Twaddell is equally skeptical of Bloomfield’s attempt to capture thenotion of phonological sameness in terms of a minimum same of physicalphonetic feature (Twaddell 1935a:23 & 24):

If such features existed, the determination of the phonemes of a given language,and the definition of the phoneme, would be achieved ... That we do not find anysuch constant, characteristic fraction is of course a commonplace of experimentalphonetics ... and there is no reason to believe that it will be.

Twaddell is not completely negative since he proposes an alternativecharacterization of the phoneme as a fiction justifying this as a way to providea “terminological convenience” while avoiding “the promissory notes of thelaboratory” (Twaddell [1935a:33] referring to Bloomfield) and avoiding also“the embarrassment of having in our discipline a fundamental unit which isundetermined and the nature of which is a matter of wide disagreement amonglinguists” (Twaddell 1935a:34). In a series of eleven statements, Twaddell(1935a:38ff) defines a microphoneme and a macrophoneme. The micro-phoneme applies to paradigmatic contrasts within one position. Using asupposed series of minimally different forms, and “The term of any minimumphonological difference among forms is called a MICRO-PHONEME” (Twaddell1935a:38). Should a second (or additional) class of forms be found such thatthey bear a one-to-one relation to the first and also such that the “qualitativearticulatory differences among the corresponding phonetic events are similar”(Twaddell 1935a:38), then “the sum of all similarly ordered terms (micro-phonemes) of similar phonological differences among forms is called aMACRO-PHONEME” (Twaddell 1935a:39). In order to establish the series offorms which enter into the paradigm for comparison, Twaddell (1935a:41)must move beyond the phonetic uniqueness of each utterance to reach asameness of form :6

The phonetic events ‘Light the lamp’ as produced by two different individuals areobjectively very different; in so far as those events evoke similar responses in

6 Utterances belong to speaking, and forms belong to language (Twaddell 1935a:40):

We must operate with the abstracted forms and their relations but theseforms are not themselves susceptible of operation. Accordingly weobserve the utterance-fractions which correspond to a form; we study theabstracted form which corresponds to utterance-fractions.


similar social situations [Talk about promissory notes! PWD], the two events arephonetically significantly alike.

3. The Consequences of TechniqueThe effect of this alternative is twofold. First , it creates for the first time

an abstraction, which does not necessarily exist in any piece of the data. It isa descriptive convenience; it is neither phonetic (as Bloomfield would have it)nor psychological (as Sapir and others would have it). The macrophoneme(the closest to the notion of the phoneme) is “an abstraction: ... [a] sum”(Twaddell 1935aa:39).7 Second, because the macrophoneme is a sum(Twaddell 1935a:49):

What occurs is not a phoneme, for the phoneme is defined as the term of arecurrent differential relation. What occurs is a phonetic fraction or adifferentiated articulatory complex correlated to a micro-phoneme. A phoneme,accordingly, does not occur [Emphasis mine, PWD]; it ‘exists’ in the somewhatpeculiar sense of existence that a brother, qua brother, ‘exists’ — as a term of arelation.8

Concern with practice, which initially colored the approach to language, hasbecome technique, a monster, taking the theory further from the data, endinghere with a kind of instrumentalism. Continued emphasis upon techniqueresults in its refinement and in its increased consistency and ‘logicalness’, butoften with unwanted results. Cf. Pa’d go below.

Beginning with what one can observe, i.e., phonetics and someinformation concerning stimulus-response correlations, one begins a series ofabstractions. And one must be logical in this. A technique cannot employwhat it does not have available. Joos (1958:96) comments:

It was the present article by Bloch [Bloch 1941] that made clear, as it never had

7 This directly contradicts Sapir’s (1933/1951.22) assertion: “... no entity in humanexperience can be adequately defined as the mechanical sum or product of its physicalproperties”. In 1941, Bloch is also characterizing the phoneme as a class (Bloch 1941:278).Hockett (1942:9) declares that “A phoneme is a class of phones determined by six criteria”.

8 This is not what Bloomfield had in mind. Compare Twaddell’s 1935a statement about‘brother’ with Bloomfield’s then recent (1933.80) claim about ‘redness’:

The phonemes of a language are not sounds but merely features of sounds [emph.mine, PWD] which the speakers have been trained to produce and recognize in thecurrent of actual speech-sound — just as motorists are trained to stop before a redsignal, be it an electric signal-light, a lamp, a flag, or what not, although there is nodisembodied redness apart from these actual sounds.

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been before, that phonemics must be kept unmixed from all that lies on theopposite side of it from phonetics: kept uninfluenced by the identities of the itemsof higher rank [Emphases mine, PWD] (morphemes and so on) which thephonemes ‘spell’, and hence free from all that their identities entail, such as theirmeaning and their grammar.

And Hockett (1942:20 & 21) further narrows the purview of phonology:

No grammatical fact of any kind is used in making phonological analysis ... Theremust be no circularity; phonological analysis is assumed for grammatical analysis,and so must not assume any part of the latter. The line of demarcation between thetwo must be sharp.

Why is it that “The line of demarcation between the two must be sharp”? Whymust phonemics “be kept unmixed from all that lies on the opposite of it”?And how can it be that meaning and grammar are “on the opposite side” fromphonetics? What sense is there in that? Where did this idea of “opposite side”come from? Clearly, the model implied by Bloomfield’s work has beenaltered. It is all base technique driven to be “consistent”.

Circumstance forces us to consider phonetics first because that is whatwe first encounter with an unknown language. Correct technique (‘scientific’technique) forces us to describe phonetics and phonology without reference tomorphology, grammar, semantics, etc. The process of analysis is linear, onestep at a time; therefore language must be constituted to reflect this linearity,and a hierarchy of sorts is created. Having done phonology, we can thensafely move to analysis of grammar, perhaps morphology. The constant and“same” reactions of Sarcee speaking John Whitney and S. Paiute speakingTony are disregarded, and the practice of consistent analysis forces us to beginwith what we perceive ... phonetics ... and pretending that neither we nor thespeaker knows anything more than the phonetics, we must complete thephonemic analysis before we proceed further. The conditions in which wepractice linguistics, our concern with description and technique, and ourconcern with being consistent so that the results of our description can beconfirmed (or rejected) move us from the non-hierarchicalized concept oflanguage of Bloomfield (the patterns of form, construction, and phoneme) andaway from the psychological concept of Sapir to one which is abstract andseparate from either sort of our data. Cf. Figure 2.

The earlier, and more interesting, problems concerning the psychologicalreality of the phoneme are now redrawn in a logico-formal mode. UnlikeSapir marveling at John Whitney’s ability to hear differences which Sapircannot, Bloch (1941) worries whether there is a complete overlap in the anal-


Stimulus-response relations

Phonetics

?

{Morphemes}

/Phonemes/

Figure 2: The beginning of layering of patterns of language.

ysis. Cf. Figure 3. Partial overlap is permitted because the distinct phoneticenvironments of the phones [x1] and [x2] allow them to be distinguished

/A/

/B/

Partial Overlap

Complete Overlap

/A/

/B/

[x ]1 [x ]2

[x ]1 [x ]2

Figure 3: Partial and complete overlap.

without regard to grammar or meaning. There is no circularity in partialoverlap. Complete overlap has no such resolution, and thus must becondemned. To resolve complete overlap, i.e., to assign [x1] and [x2] to non-same entities, requires some way of recognizing when we have either [x1] or[x2]. The phonetic environment is not available for this decision because it isthe same in both occurrences. Then we must rely upon non-phonetic criteria,e.g. John Whitney’s Sarcee reliance on knowing when he was confronted withutterances meaning ‘this one’ or it makes a sound’. And with the rejection of

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complete overlap go Sapir’s analyses of Sarcee and Nootka, and Trager’sanalysis of the Russian consonants, all cases of complete overlap.

4. Some OutcomesThere are two further effects of note to follow from this change. First , the

VARIETY TYPE OF PATTERN

English [f] and [v] Morphophonology

Phonology

Tunica

Russian

Russian

[ i] and Ø

[d] and [t]

[é] and [ ]

Figure 4: A revision of types of pattern.

Morphophonology

Morphophonology

alignment of the patterns as drawn in Figure 1 are changed. Cf. Figure 4.Second, the refinement in method has some unwanted results. The Englishvowel system has regularly short and long allophones of the stressed vowelsbased on the voiced quality of the following consonant (Bloch 1941:283-84):

(1) (a) cot /kat/ [ ](b) cod /kad/ [ ]

(2) (a) sat /s t/ [ ](b) sad /s d/ [ ]

(3) (a) nought /nót/ [ ](b) gnawed /nód/ [

/ [ ](b) bud /b d/ [ ]

and so forth. Bloch personally had in his speech a series of words bomb, bother, and sorry


which differ vocalically from

balm, father, and starry

only by the fact that the vowel in the second group is longer than the vowel inthe first. The long vowel of balm, father, and starry reappears in

alms, palm, pa, star, and card

The difficulty arises in these utterances:

(5) The pod grows.

(6) Pa’d go (if he could).

Pod and Pa’d are both [ ], yet the previous statements incline us to writepod as /pad/ (cf. [1] - [4]) and Pa’d as /pa:d/ (cf. alms, palm, pa, star, andcard): a case of complete overlap. What to do? Bloch’s solution appears to bethis (Bloch 1941:284):

We are left, then with the other alternative. By classifying the vowel of pod —and consequently also the vowels of rob, nod, bog, fond, and the like — asmembers of the phoneme of balm, we destroy the neat parallelism of the pairs bitbid, bet bed, bite bide, pot pod: the words in the last pair, instead of exhibitingshorter and longer allophones of the same phoneme, have totally differentphonemes. But by sacrificing this symmetry we are able to account for all thefacts of pronunciation, which is sure the more important requirement[Emphases mine, PWD]. The resulting system is lopsided; but the classes it setsup are such that if we start from the actual utterances of the dialect we can neverbe in doubt of the class to which any particular fraction of utterance must beassigned.9

Thus,

(7) (a) cot /kat/ [ ](b) cod /ka:d/ [ ]

(8) (a) sat / / [ ](b) sad / / [ ]

9 And we have become the linguistic equivalent of accountants.

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etc.

Not only have we replaced the substance of language with methodology, wehave lost all sense of proportion!


Chapter 10

American Strucutralism:Preeminent Methodology

1. IntroductionFrom the period of 1933 (Bloomfield and Sapir) to 1942 (culminating with

Hockett 1942), we have seen preoccupation with practical methodology andwith the derivation of theoretical notions such as the phoneme control thediscussion of language to the point where analytic technique now dominates.Method is no longer the application (guide and refiner) of the theory; methodis the theory.

2. Method as TheoryI abstract here as PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION, OBSERVATIONS, and

PHONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS what would have been considered ‘good’linguistic practice with regard to phonology at the period following itscodification by Hockett (1942). We may call this the period of ClassicalAmerican Structuralism.1

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION. Objective. Elements are phones. Source:the trained ear. Employs a phonetic alphabet. Indicated by squarebrackets.

OBSERVATIONS about phonetic transcription, about pairs of phones.

Contrast: Two distinct phones are in contrast if (i) they occur inutterances such that their respective phonetic environments aresimilar (If we say ‘identical’, then we identify the two utterances

1 ... with respect to phonology. Other aspects, e.g. morphophonemics, morphology, andsyntax, follow later. Hockett (1942:9) provides a more schematic characterization in terms ofsix criteria for determining whether phones constitute a phoneme: similarity, non-intersection, contrastive and complementary distribution, completeness, pattern congruity,and economy.

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as constituting a minimal pair.) and (ii) the glosses of theutterances are distinct.‘Similar’ means that we cannotcharacterize the difference between the environments, althoughwe may be able to list the differences. Listing does not suffice.

Complementary distribution : Two distinct phones are incomplementary distribution if they occur in utterances such thattheir respective phonetic environments are not similar; that is, wecan characterize the difference between the environments.

Free variation: Two distinct phones are in free variation if theyoccur in utterances such that their respective phoneticenvironments are identical, but the glosses of the utterances arenot distinct.

Phonetic similarity: Two distinct phones that share more phoneticproperties are more similar phonetically than two which sharefewer. You determine this by knowing phonetics, i.e., how soundsare articulated. Phonetic similarity is a continuum of similarity.

PHONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS (conclusions based on the OBSERVATIONS).

Stage I. Any pair of phones that are related by free variation and/orby complementary distribution and which are phonetically similarare to be considered members (allophones) of the same class(phoneme). Definition: Phoneme — a class of sounds/phoneswhich are in free variation and/or complementary distribution andwhich are phonetically similar. The phonetic members of thephoneme are allophones. Phonemic notation is by slant line(solidi), i.e., / /; allophonic, like phonetic, notation is by squarebracket, i.e., [ ].Any pair of phones related by contrast (in minimal pairs or not)belong to separate phonemes, and the phonetic property(ies) thatdistinguish(es) them is/are phonemic or distinctive. Forexample, voice is phonemic/distinctive for English obstruents.

Stage II. If Stage I yields more than one possible grouping intoallophones, choose the grouping that yields the simplest statementof phonotactics; that is, maximize pattern congruity.

The application of these techniques to a corpus of data from any languagewhatsoever should result in the phonological description of them. Note ‘the’,not ‘a’. The purpose of a scientific description is eliminate arbitrariness from

PREEMINENT METHODOLOGY 3

the description, and whenever the analyst is required to select the better (or‘the’) description of the language, thus identifying its structure, the theoryreveals itself as less that maximally ‘scientific’. Hockett (1942:9) notes “thedanger of arbitrary procedure” and introduces the last two of his criteria (cf.footnote 1) to avoid arbitrariness. The concern with this is shared by bothsides of the psychological – material disagreement.2 Swadesh (1935:1) stateshis position:

Is phonemic procedure arbitrary? It can be, but I submit that it need not be. If onedefines a phoneme as ‘one of an exhaustive list of classes of sound in a language’,one admits an endless variety of treatments and the choice of one or anothertreatment is arbitrary. The ideal of exhaustiveness is not in itself sufficient todefine a unique scientific procedure. But if we also take the ideals of simplicityand self-consistency, we have the basis for a non-arbitrary method ... To attain thisideal [Emphasis mine, PWD], it is necessary to consider always the totality ofphenomena in the given language.

And Twaddell (1935b:57):

... intuition may or may not be ‘correct’; the fact remains that an intuition has nobusiness in a science [Emphasis mine, PWD], if we can get along without it.

In that the techniques are now mechanical applications, they should determinewithout intervention of the linguist what the description of the language islike.

3. Evaluation ProceduresThere are two evaluation procedures within the theory. They are pattern

congruity and simplicity (or economy). But arbitrariness was not only theresult of ‘incomplete’ techniques; it could also arise from the conflict betweenprocedures. An example from Swadesh (1935:246) will illustrate this conflictbriefly:

Open syllables Closed syllables [i] [

] [ ] [ ]

2 There was a series of exchanges between Twaddell and Swadesh: Twaddell (1935a),Swadesh (1935), Twaddell (1935b,which includes a final note with Twaddell recording someinterim comments of Swadesh from personal correspondence), and Swadesh (1937).

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The simplest description to these data will recognize three contrastingphonemes, but if we take phonetic similarity literally, then phonetic identity isthe maximum degree of phonetic similarity. The simplest phonologicaldescription for the above data ignores the absolute phonetic similaritybetween [] in open syllables and the [] in closed syllables and proposes aphonemic system of three vowels. The criterion of simplicity overrides thecriterion of phonetic similarity. If we reverse the importance of the twocriteria, the description will require four vowels: /i/ [i ], /e/ [ / [ ], and / /[ ]. If we insist on maintaining the description with three phonemic vowels, itwill require that we ignore phonetic parallelism placing [e] and [] together asallophones. Such problems as this lead to the interpretation of phoneticsimilarity in a relative way, not an absolute way.3

The notion of pattern congruity appears as early as Swadesh (1934:124):

The criterion of pattern congruity. Particular formulations must be congruous withthe general phonemic pattern of the given language. Thus, although Navaho i(occurring only after consonants) and y (occurring only before vowels) arecomplementary in distribution, they are nevertheless independent phonemesbecause of the fact that Navaho is generally characterized by a sharp distinctionbetween vowel and consonant. (As a matter of fact, any vowel would be found tobe in complementary distribution to almost any consonant.) In another language,non-syllabic and syllabic i might be positional variants of the same phoneme.

For Hockett (1942:9), pattern congruity is one of six criteria for determiningwhether a class of phonemes constitute a phoneme (“a class of phones”):4

3 Recall Twaddell’s (1935a:38-39) use of ‘phonetic ordering’ of micro-phonemic classes andthe comparison of these phonetically ordered micro-phonemic classes with other todetermine the macro-phonemic sums. For Twaddell, the example from Swadesh wouldexhibit phonetic ordering of ‘high’, ‘mid’, and ‘low’ for both micro-phonemic systems. Therelevant comparison would be between the ‘high’ vowels of each (i.e., [i] and []), the ‘mid’vowels of each (i.e., [e] and []), and the ‘low’ vowels of each (i.e., [] and [ ]). “Onlysimilarities in the relations can be valid; not phonetic similarity of the units themselves”(Twaddell 1935b:58).

In a final comment in Twaddell (1935b:59), Twaddell records a suggestion from Swadeshproposed to him in correspondence:

He [Swadesh] proposes not absolute, but relative phonetic similarity as a phonemiccriterion, and now offers a more unambiguous statement: Micro-phonemes that, on thebasis of their phonetic nature, occupy a like place in comparable series [matched one-to-one, PWD] are equivalent.

They agree on this.

4 The relation of α-phonetics and β-phonetics to each other and the other terms of languagecan be represented as follows:


Pattern congruity: two contrasting -segments (single -sounds or groups ofsuch sounds) which occur in similar -phonetic environments are to be analyzedas having similar structures; either they are both unit phones, members of differentphonemes belonging to the same functional class, or else they are similar clustersof two or more phones. This statement emphasizes the importance of structuralparallelism: like function, like structure.

Any evaluation is retrospective. Thus, while one is in the act of analyzingdata, it is not possible to employ that criterion. This aspect of the criterionprompts some, first Twaddell in 1935, and then Haugen & Twaddell again in1942, to condemn its use (Twaddell 1935:55):

In Swadesh’s defence of his ‘criterion of pattern congruity’ (248), I miss anyattempt to justify the assumption that there is an a priori phonemic system orpattern. Until he establishes such a system as existent, and existent apart from thephonemic relations, I must continue to regard his ‘criterion of pattern congruity’ adangerously circular one to apply in the determination of particular phonemicrelations.

and (Haugen & Twaddell 1942:235)

The additional concept of ‘phonetic interrelationship’ or ‘pattern analysis’ ...seems to be little more than a covert appeal to the system that is to be establishedand therefore a circular argument.

Like reference to grammatical identity, reference to not-yet-known phonemicsystem smacks of illegitimate circularity. Most, however, ignore Haugen andTwaddell’s objection (although they still reject the use of grammar) in theiranalyses.

One of the best known applications of pattern congruity is in the analysisof English vowels by Trager and Bloch (1941). As might be expected, therewere competing analyses of English phonology, most notably by Swadesh(1947), and by Pike (1947). The phonetic facts involved in the discussion areorganized into three sets and presented below as THE PHONETICS:

Morphology| <–– Morphophonemics

Phonology| <–– β-Phonetics

α-Phonetics

β-phonetics is phonetics seen from the perspective of phonology; α-phonetics is phoneticsobjectively and without the bias of a phonological perspective.

6 HALT

THE PHONETICS.I. [ ] pit [ ] put

[ ] pet [ ] putt[ ] pat [ ] bought

[ ] pot

II. [ ] beat [ ] boot[ ] bait [ ] boat

[ ] bite [ ] bout

III. [ ] bee [ ] boo[b ] bay [ ] bow

[ ] buy [ ] bow

PHONEMICIZATION I (Trager & Bloch 1941).

/i/ [ ] /u/ [ ]/e/ [ ] /o/ [

/i/ [ ]/e/ [ ] /o/ [

Swadesh (1947:146) questions whether the /y/ and /w/ of Trager and Blochbehave like consonants in positions other than in the monosyllabic frame CVC

5 Bloomfield (1935:100-101) comes to a similar conclusion for his description of Central-Western English.


and he cites these data:6

... it is necessary to ask if the diphthongal second elements are like consonants instill other positions. If the following syllable is unaccented and the preceding isaccented, it has a different treatment, one that had been described by Trager andBloch as ambisyllabic ... In any event there is a difference, which we cansymbolize by the placing of the hyphen, as between spi-túun, di-lém-, ti-r n- -kl, si-nít-ik, d -kèid, hí-tàit, sé-rèit (spitton, dilemma, tyrannical, Sinitic, decade,Hittite, serrate) and pép-r, wík- r, míl- t, pén-ii (pepper, wicker, millet, penny).The diphthongal elements follow the second type of treatment (with precedingsyllable or indeterminate) even before an accented vowel: kei-áat-ik, mii-n-d r,dai- , pou-ét-ik, duu-ét (chaotic, meander, Diana, poetic, duet). Thus they areseen to divide in a manner that is clearly diferent from consonants.

They pattern syllabically unlike spi-ttoon, di-lemma, de-cade, and Hi-ttite.Treating the data of PHONETIC DATA II (‘long vowels’) and PHONETIC DATA

III (‘diphthongs’) as unit vowels is also criticized (Swadesh 1947:147-48):

... It cannot be said that the unit treatment is basically wrong or inadequate. Yetthere is a difference, which can be described as one of simplicity. The analytictreatment reduces the syllabics to a smaller number of primary units –– betweenfive and nine, instead of between fourteen and more than twenty. Moreover, thebasic units are relatively uniform instead of falling into two fundamentallydifferent classes (short-bound and long free).

PHONEMICIZATION III (Pike 1947).

/i/ [ ] /u/ [ ]/e/ [ ] /o/ [

Pike’s alternative relies upon native speaker perception of the diphthongs andthe reproduction of pure long vowels by these speakers (Pike 1947:151):

... my colleagues and I have observed the following fact: It is relatively easy toteach these students to notice that [a] is phonetically composed of two parts –– a

6 Swadesh replaces the symbol // with / /.

8 HALT

vowel somewhat similar to the [a] of father and an [] somewhat similar to the []of bit or the [i] of beet; [ ] and [ ] act like [a] ...

On the other hand, practically without exception, the students haveconsiderable difficulty in learning to recognize two elements, or a glide, in the[ ] of boat, toe, and similar words ... A similar situation exists for the [] of bait,may, and the like, except that the difficulty is possibly a bit greater ... For [] and[ ] as in beet and boot, even greater difficulty exists for the students, presumablybecause the diphthongization is phonetically less pronounced than for [] and[ ].

Additionally, in precontour (or pendant) position the diphthongization canbe lessened or lost and a pure vowel appear (Pike 1947:155):7

(1) (a) [ ] It’s a «bike that I want.3- ˚2- -4//

(b) [ ] The bike that «you have is the «best. 3- ˚2- -4-3 3- ˚2-4//

(2) (a) [ ] You say you saw the «bout?! 3- ˚2- -4//

(b) [ ] The bout for the «championship will come next «month. 3- ˚2 -4-3 3- °2-4//

(3) (a) [ ] It’s «bait that I want. 3- ˚2 -4//

(b) [e] The bait is «spoiled. 3- ˚2- -4//

Pike (1947:155) notes the following of such examples:

From this evidence we draw the following conclusions. (1) The set [], [ ], [ ]acts differently from the set [], [ ], [ ], [ ] in that the first set retains itsstrongly diphthongal character even in the rapid part of the intonational contour,while the second set tends to lose most of its diphthongal character in such aposition. (2) In the set [], [ ], [ ] , each sound is a sequence of two units, ofwhich the second does not disappear even in rapid pronunciation; but in the set[ ], [ ], [ ], [ ], each sound is structurally a single unit (phonetically

7 “Primary contours begin on ... syllables ... as indicated by the degree sign [i.e., º] underthem ... The numbers indicate relative pitch of the voice. Pitch 1 is the highest, pitch 4 islowest, pitches 2 and 3 are intermediate. Syllables which have no number beneath them neednot occur on one of these relative levels but are more or less evenly distributed between thepitches preceding and following them” (Pike 1947.153).


complex), which may be modified according to the intonational environment inwhich it occurs. (3) The difference in students’ reactions to the two sets issubstantiated by the fact that these sets show different ranges of variation in thedegree to which they remain diphthongal in various intonation contours. (4) Sincethe configurational reality of the difference between the two sets is attested by theoccurrence of different variants in similar contexts and by different nativereactions, it appears that the latter type of evidence [Emphases mine, PWD] canbe legitimately used to support other evidence for grouping sounds in a linguisticsystem: namely, the manner in which speakers of one language react to the soundsof a second language in their attempts to hear, pronounce, and record them, isvaluable and valid evidence to be considered in analyzing the phonemic system ofthe first language.

This is just the kind of psychologizing that has been condemned by Twaddelland others. The generally accepted system is that of Trager and Bloch.

4. ConclusionBy 1942, reliance on a speaker’s subjective reaction as earlier advocated

by Sapir, Swadesh and others is now not the accepted way to do phonology.There is consensus on the use of the objective (hence, more scientific) notionsof contrast, complementary distribution, free variation, and phoneticsimilarity. They are the way to go. However, a second or third, etc. applicationof the techniques to the same data may produce alternative conclusions.Assuming that only one can be “correct”, some have to be discarded.Everyone agrees that it is not scientific to select arbitrarily among thecompeting descriptions, and the debate turns on the elimination ofarbitrariness, i.e., how to finalize the description where the techniques yieldmore than one. Refining the techniques, e.g. the idea of relative phoneticsimilarity, is one way of reducing the number of possible descriptions.Retrospective comparison of competing analyses with respect to someevaluative criteria is another, and one that is standard in other sciences. Thefact that some linguists could react to evaluation as if it were “circular” is ameasure of the degree to which sanitized technique has substituted for anunderstanding of language


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